Fatima Castiglione Maldonado [Fatima Castiglione Maldonado] - Introduction to Blockchain and Ethereum

Blockchain applications provide a single-shared ledger to eliminate trust issues involving multiple stakeholders.

With the help of Introduction to Blockchain and Ethereum, you'll learn how to create distributed blockchain applications that do not depend on a central server or datacenter. The course begins by explaining Bitcoin, Altcoins, and Ethereum, followed by taking you through distributed programming using the Solidity language on the Ethereum blockchain.

By the end of this course, you'll be able to write, compile, and deploy your own smart contracts to the Ethereum blockchain.

Fatima Castiglione Maldonado is an entrepreneur with more than 10 years of experience in the IT industry and 5 years of experience in the cryptocurrency space. Her team at Ethernity.live does contract work for crypto, and they are now also launching their own project.

"This book was written by me, Fatima Castiglione Maldonado, and co-authored by Marco Castiglione Maldonado, who wrote made corrections and amendments to most of the material. The code included in this book is based on developments done by our team at Ethernity.live (Juan Livingston, Jaime Irazabal, and Yoscar Hernandez). Big thanks to Giannella Papini and Fiona Castiglione Maldonado for their support; also, thanks to all the team at Packt."

• Grasp blockchain concepts such as private and public keys, addresses, wallets, and hashes
• Send and analyze transactions in the Ethereum Rinkeby test network
• Compile and deploy your own ERC20-compliant smart contracts and tokens
• Test your smart contracts using MyEtherWallet
• Create a distributed web interface for your contract
• Combine Solidity and JavaScript to create your very own decentralized application

Introduction to Blockchain and Ethereum is ideal for you if you want to get to grips with blockchain technology and develop your own distributed applications with smart contracts written in Solidity. Prior exposure to an object-oriented programming language such as JavaScript is needed, as you'll cover the basics before getting straight to work.

This course thoroughly explains the technology in an easy-to-understand language while perfectly balancing theory and exercises. Each lesson is designed to build on the learnings of the previous lesson. The course also contains multiple activities that use real-life business scenarios for you to practice and apply your new skills in a highly relevant context.

For an optimal student experience, we recommend the following hardware configuration:

• Intel Core i3 processor or equivalent
• 2 GB RAM (1.5 GB if running on a virtual machine)
• 10 GB available hard disk space
• 5400 RPM hard disk drive
• DirectX 9-capable video card (1024 x 768 or higher resolution)
• Internet connection

You'll also need the following software installed in advance:

• Operating system: Windows 8 or higher (64-bit version)
• Mist (https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases/)
• Truffle (http://truffleframework.com/)

Copy the code bundle for the class to the C:/Code folder.

The code bundle for this course is also hosted on GitHub at: https://github.com/TrainingByPackt/Introduction-to-Blockchain-and-Ethereum.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "You should name the file index.js."

A block of code is set as follows:

/* Contract data: array with balances and initial number of tokens */

mapping (address => uint256) public balanceOf;

uint initialSupply = 1000000 public;