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 an array


We have already briefly touched on the topic of structures. Structures help in defining custom user-defined data structures. Structures help in group multiple variables of different data types into a single type. A structure does not contain any programming logic or code for execution; it just contains a variable declaration. Structures are reference types and are treated as complex type in Solidity.

Structures can be defined as state variables, as shown in the next code illustration. A struct composed of string, uint, bool, and uint arrays is defined. There are two state variables. They are on the storage location. While the first stateStructure1 state variable is initialized at the time of declaration, the other stateStructure1 state variable is left to be initialized later within a function.

A local structure at the memory location is declared and initialized within the getAge function.

Another structure is declared that acts as a pointer to the stateStructure state...