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

Summary


This chapter, in many ways, was a continuation of previous chapters. Variables were discussed in depth in the first half of this chapter. Variable hoisting, type conversions, details about the var data type, and the scope of Solidity variables were elaborated on, along with code examples. The latter half of the chapter focused on globally available variables and functions. Transaction and message related variables, such as block.coinbase, msg.data and many more, were explained. The difference between msg.sender and tx.origin along with their usage was also explained in this chapter. This chapter also discussed cryptographic, address, and contract-level functions. However, we will focus on these functions in another chapter later in this book.

The following chapter will focus on Solidity expressions and control structures, covering programming details about loops and conditions. This will be an important chapter because every program needs some kind of looping to perform repetitive...