Book Image

Solidity Programming Essentials

Book Image

Solidity Programming Essentials

Overview of this book

Solidity is a contract-oriented language whose syntax is highly influenced by JavaScript, and is designed to compile code for the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Solidity Programming Essentials will be your guide to understanding Solidity programming to build smart contracts for Ethereum and blockchain from ground-up. We begin with a brief run-through of blockchain, Ethereum, and their most important concepts or components. You will learn how to install all the necessary tools to write, test, and debug Solidity contracts on Ethereum. Then, you will explore the layout of a Solidity source file and work with the different data types. The next set of recipes will help you work with operators, control structures, and data structures while building your smart contracts. We take you through function calls, return types, function modifers, and recipes in object-oriented programming with Solidity. Learn all you can on event logging and exception handling, as well as testing and debugging smart contracts. By the end of this book, you will be able to write, deploy, and test smart contracts in Ethereum. This book will bring forth the essence of writing contracts using Solidity and also help you develop Solidity skills in no time.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Solidity and Solidity files


Solidity is a programming language that is very close to JavaScript. Similarities between JavaScript and C can be found within Solidity. Solidity is a statically-typed, case-sensitive, and object-oriented programming (OOP) language. Although it is object-oriented, it supports limited objected orientation features. What this means is that variable data types should be defined and known at compile time. Functions and variables should be written in OOP same way as they are defined. In Solidity, Cat is different from CAT, cat, or any other variation of cat. The statement terminator in Solidity is the semicolon: ;.

Solidity code is written in Solidity files that have the extension .sol. They are human-readable text files that can be opened as text files in any editor including Notepad.

A Solidity file is composed of the following four high-level constructs:

  • Pragma
  • Comments
  • Import
  • Contracts/library/interface

Pragma

Pragma is generally the first line of code within any Solidity...