Preface
We wrote this book to make smart contract development more accessible and easy to understand for beginners looking to explore developing on the blockchain.
It can be daunting when you have terms such as networks, nodes, and forks being thrown around. This book will help you learn how to create and test your own smart contract, create a frontend for users to interact with, and more. We wrote this book because we want to provide a resource for people who want to break into the field but don’t know where to start. We’ve had so many people ask us how they can get started and tell us how overwhelmed they feel about diving into the blockchain. Even engineers with years of experience don’t know where to start when trying to dive into smart contract development.
This book will guide you through the entire process of building a smart contract like you would in the real world, and deploying it to help users interact with it through an application.
This book is for anyone who wants to dive into blockchain development and get hands-on experience writing smart contracts. You should have an editor as well as some basic engineering knowledge like how to start a terminal.
There are various ways you can get involved in the community and learn more about smart contract development beyond this book. Here are a few to check out.
Mastering Ethereum
O’Reilly has another book, Mastering Ethereum by Andreas Antonopoulos and Gavin Wood, which is a deep dive on Ethereum. While this book focuses on getting hands-on experience with smart contract development, Mastering Ethereum will provide you with a deeper dive into topics like cryptography, wallets, transactions, and more.
ConsenSys Academy
ConsenSys, the global blockchain company, offers a course on Ethereum development. The course is available twice a year and the company hires from within the program. The 11-week course offers active support from instructors and a connection with the rest of the cohort.
The nice thing about the ConsenSys course is that it offers a certification upon completion of the quizzes and the final project. The top students in the cohort are also considered for employment inside ConsenSys.
B9 Academy
If you’re just starting out with Ethereum and want to learn more, B9 Academy offers a free Ethereum course available to anyone. Introduction to Ethereum for Developers gives you an overview of the basics of Ethereum. The course will walk through an introduction to Ethereum development such as how private keys work, what a merkle tree is, what the differences are between the types of networks, and more. While no certification is offered for the free course, this is a great way to dip your toes into Ethereum development and determine if a paid course might be for you.
Another option is the paid course from B9, which is one of the best online courses on Ethereum currently available. The course has extensive content and offers a certificate upon completion. You’ll build three projects and have access to the B9 Slack, which is a great resource for connecting with other people in the community and getting help with Ethereum questions or projects. The course also offers instructors for tutoring and mentorship throughout the duration of the course. If you do well on the final exam, you’ll receive the B9 certification.
Conventions Used in This Book
The following typographical conventions are used in this book:
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Tip
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Note
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Using Code Examples
Supplemental material (code examples, exercises, etc.) is available for download at https://github.com/RedSquirrelTech/hoscdev.
If you have a technical question or a problem using the code examples, please send an email to [email protected].
This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, if example code is offered with this book, you may use it in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing examples from O’Reilly books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code from this book into your product’s documentation does require permission.
We appreciate, but generally do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For example: “Hands-On Smart Contract Development with Solidity and Ethereum by Kevin Solorio, Randall Kanna, and David H. Hoover (O’Reilly). Copyright 2020 Kevin Solorio, Randall Kanna, and David H. Hoover, 978-1-492-04526-7.”
If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the permission given above, feel free to contact us at [email protected].
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank our editor, Melissa Potter from O’Reilly, for all the feedback and guidance as we were writing this book. We would also like to thank our tech reviewers, Brian Wu, John Mardlin, and Destry Saul, for their detailed feedback and recommendations on how to improve our examples. Thanks also go to our earlier reviewers Alina Chu, Phillip Birtcher, and Corey Haines for their insights as we were just getting started in our writing journey.
Kevin would like to thank his partner Alyssa for all the support and encouragement during crunch time. He would also like to thank his mother Peggy and brother Luis for always encouraging him to take chances and pursue his dreams.
Randall would like to thank her partner Jack for supporting her in everything she does. Always. And her family of authors who inspired her to write this book and always have grit. And her Aunt Kat, who always gives encouragement and support at any hour of the day and any day of the week.
Dave would like to thank Kevin and Randall for working valiantly to finish this book! Also thanks to Brian Forde for nudging him down the blockchain rabbit hole, and Conrad Barski for his mentoring, leadership, and camaraderie. Finally, he would like to thank his partner Heather Corallo for her encouragement and insights.