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

Smart contracts


What are smart contracts? Everybody bears an expression trying to understand the meaning of contracts and the significance of the word "smart" in reference to contracts. Smart contracts are, essentially, code segments or programs that are deployed and executed in EVM. A contract is a term generally used in the legal world and has little relevance in the programming world. Writing a smart contract in Solidity does not mean writing a legal contract. Moreover, contracts are like any other programming code, containing Solidity code, and are executed when someone invokes them. There is inherently nothing smart about it. A smart contract is a blockchain term; it is a piece of jargon used to refer to programming logic and code that executes within EVM.

A smart contract is very similar to a C++, Java, or C# class. Just as a class is composed of state (variables) and behaviors (methods), contracts contain state variables and functions. The purpose of state variables is to maintain...