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

Structure of a contract


The primary purpose of Solidity is to write smart contracts for Ethereum. Smart contracts are the basic unit of deployment and execution for EVMs. Although multiple chapters later in this book are dedicated to writing and developing smart contracts, the basic structure of smart contracts is discussed in this chapter. 

Technically, smart contracts are composed of two constructs—variables and functions. There are multiple facets to both variables and functions and that is again something that will be discussed throughout this book. This section is about describing the general structure of a smart contract using the Solidity language.

A contract consists of the following multiple constructs:

  • State variables
  • Structure definitions
  • Modifier definitions
  • Event declarations
  • Enumeration definitions
  • Function definitions

A typical contract consists of all the preceding constructs. In the following screenshot, it is to be noted that each of these constructs in turn consists of multiple...