Preface

If you’ve followed the meteoric rise (in December 2017) and subsequent fall of Bitcoin, you’ve also heard about blockchain. Blockchain is the technology behind Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies like Litecoin and Dash. It’s a decentralized database, replicated across a large network, on which transactions are secured cryptographically. Most blockchains have a single purpose: to support a decentralized currency.

Ethereum was created in 2013 as a general-purpose blockchain. It allows developers to develop any decentralized application (Dapp), so it’s considered a programmable blockchain.

Having followed Bitcoin and being a software developer, I was blown away by this idea and excited about the impact Ethereum could have on many industries and on society, so I started to experiment with it a couple of years ago.

I found my own learning experience very inefficient. There were no books initially, and only a few blogs, and the official documentation moved slower than the technology. Although more resources started to spring up, they were scattered all over the web, and their quality was inconsistent. So I proposed a project to Manning: a convenient book that aims to bring together in one place all you need to know to build a full Ethereum Dapp. This is the book I would have liked to read when I started my blockchain journey. I hope that by reading it you’ll learn Ethereum much more quickly than I did!