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

by Ritesh Modi

Learn the most powerful primary programming language for writing smart contracts and discover how to write, deploy, and test smart contracts in Ethereum Solidity is a contract-oriented language with a syntax that is highly influenced by JavaScript, and designed to compile code for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Solidity Programming Essentials is your guide to understanding Solidity programming to build smart contracts for Ethereum and blockchain from ground-up. The book will begin by taking you through concepts like blockchain, and Ethereum, in addition to highlighting their most important components. Next, you'll delve into the technicalities of installing the necessary tools to write, test, and debug Solidity contracts on Ethereum. You'll then go on to explore the layout of a Solidity source file and work with the different data types. The next set of recipes will help you to work with operators, control structures, and data structures while building your smart contracts. As you progress further, you'll study function calls, return types, function modifiers, and recipes in object-oriented programming with Solidity. You'll also get well-versed with event logging, exception handling, and testing and debugging smart contracts. By the end of this book, you'll not only have knowledge of Ethereum and blockchain concepts, but also be able to write, deploy, and test smart contracts in Ethereum. This beginner-level book is for anyone who wants to get started with Solidity programming for developing Ethereum smart contracts. No prior knowledge of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is required.

222 pages, Paperback

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.