Solidity Programming Essentials: A beginner's guide to build smart contracts for Ethereum and blockchain

by Ritesh Modi

Learn the most powerful and primary programming language for writing smart contracts and find out how to write, deploy, and test smart contracts in Ethereum.

Key FeaturesGet you up and running with Solidity Programming language Build Ethereum Smart Contracts with Solidity as your scripting language Learn to test and deploy the smart contract to your private Blockchain Book DescriptionSolidity 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.

What you will learnLearn the basics and foundational concepts of Solidity and Ethereum Explore the Solidity language and its uniqueness in depthCreate new accounts and submit transactions to blockchainGet to know the complete language in detail to write smart contractsLearn about major tools to develop and deploy smart contractsWrite defensive code using exception handling and error checkingUnderstand Truffle basics and the debugging processWho this book is forThis book is for anyone who would like to get started with Solidity Programming for developing an Ethereum smart contract. No prior knowledge of EVM is required.

Table of ContentsIntroduction to Blockchain, Ethereum, and Smart ContractsInstalling Ethereum and SolidityIntroducing SolidityGlobal Variables and FunctionsExpressions and Control StructuresWriting Smart ContractsFunctions, Modifiers, and FallbacksExceptions, Events, and LoggingTruffle Basics and Unit Testing Debugging Contracts

339 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 20, 2018

Reviews

[Pascal · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this book does explain some usages, patterns and thinks to keep in mind when developing smart contracts, it's really mainly a language documentation - not very practice oriented. If you're looking for a book that shows how to apply Solidity by example (by actually building an app), this book is not what you're looking for.

[Pablo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'd say this is a good introduction to Solidity for those who know nothing (like myself before reading this book), but I'd be lying. This is so poorly written and has so many many MANY errors, that if you actually don't know anything about Solidity, it will confuse you as hell and leave you looking for more resources online (as I'm doing).
If you are already a developer in other languages, you'll spot the mistakes easily and get around them. But this is plagued with paragraphs explaining one thing followed by an example that doesn't match the description before.
One error is ok, but this is happening throughout the entire book.
And on some chapters, it will start by listing the topics the chapter will cover, and then some of those topics are not even mentioned later on.
Did no one do a revision on this before publishing it?

I'm giving it 2 stars instead of 1 just because it can be useful as an introductory book if you can spot the mistakes and get over them.

[Henry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good for beginners easy read

[Sean · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very weak book. It doesn't contain much content that is different from the manual pages for Solidity. And the text for Truffle and Remix is extremely light.

[Govind Thange · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to quickly go through all the solidity constructs along with the basic concepts then this book is for you. Very concise and to the point.