Become a Blockchain Developer with Ethereum and Solidity

What you'll learn

Understand the basic philosophy behind the blockchain and distributed/decentralized applications
The basics of how a blockchain generally works, just enough to be able to use it as a development platform
Develop a distributed application, from creating a blank project to deploying it in production all the way through writing smart contracts, unit testing them, and creating a user interface for them
How to combine the right tools to put together a consistent and real world pragmatic development environment
The fundamentals of the Solidity smart contract language
How to use the Truffle build and testing framework (covers Truffle 4)
How to deploy a decentralized app to various Ethereum instances (testrpc, private chain, test chain, main net)
How to unit test smart contracts


Requirements

You should already have developed a couple of software applications, backend, frontend or both
You need a Mac, Linux or Windows 10 machine to develop the sample application
A basic understanding of a programming language like Javascript is definitely a plus

Description

February 2018 Update

We released the first version of this course in September 2017. Back then, the latest version of Truffle was version 3, and the best Ethereum node emulator was testrpc, on the command line.

Then, in November 2017, the Truffle team released both Truffle 4 and a new user interface for testrpc called Ganache. Those tools had a big impact on the development lifecycle, so we took this opportunity to completely rewrite and re-shoot the practical part of this course.

We also took this opportunity to integrate most of the comments and feedbacks we got in the Q&A section of this course. So all the details you needed to troubleshoot issues are now part of the content.

This results in a consequent update with quite a few improvements:

Full Truffle 4 coverage, including Truffle debug and Truffle develop
Full Ganache coverage
MetaMask workarounds, tips and tricks
All the content has been tested on MacOS, Linux and Windows (PowerShell)
Code is not copy-pasted anymore, we type everything live to make it easier to follow along

Note that the old content will remain online for a few weeks, and then we will unpublish them so that students don't need to watch all the old content to complete the course and get the Udemy certificate.

If you notice any issue, bug, outdated content, missing link or resource, please let us know in the Q&A section of this course.

Welcome to "Become a Blockchain Developer with Ethereum and Solidity"!

This course is a complete introduction to decentralized application (Dapp) development on the Ethereum blockchain using the Solidity language and the Truffle build framework.

No need to know anything about the blockchain, you should just have some basic software development experience. Whether you have already written some code for backend, web or mobile applications, it should be enough to become a blockchain developer thanks to this course.

The blockchain is all the rage these days, and there is a lot of theoretical or anticipative talk around it, but this course will help you get your hands dirty with actual code in order to build your first decentralized application. This is the kind of skill that can get you an actual job as a blockchain developer, something that is in skyrocketing demand right now.

Have you ever looked back on the nineties, thinking you would have loved to be a part of the web revolution. Well, stop dreaming: the blockchain is here and it promises to be even bigger than the web or even the mobile revolution.

What we cover

We briefly cover the philosophy of the blockchain, both as a crypto-currency system and as a development platform
Then we will explain how blockchains work, what are their main components and how its ecosystem is structured
After that we quickly go over the main cryptographic tools you need to understand
We continue with a description of the perfect development environment, including tools that are used by most professional blockchain developers
And the biggest part of the course is dedicated to guiding you through the iterative creation, development, testing and deployment of the ChainList decentralized application

The tools we use

Ethereum of course
The Metamask Chrome extension
The Solidity smart contract language
The Truffle build and test framework (Truffle 4)
The Ganache Ethereum node emulator
Github Pages
Atom (text editor)
The Rinkeby test network

We deliberately don't reinvent the wheel or develop our own build tools because it didn't seem very pragmatic to do that. That's why we demonstrate the use of development tools like Truffle and Ganache that offer a lot of very powerful features, even though they evolve very often.

Most of the videos were shot on a Mac, but we give detailed instructions on how to set up your environment on Linux and Windows, and all the other lessons have been tested and adapted with a few OS-specific instructions.

Who this course is for:

Anybody with a little bit of backend and/or frontend software development experience