Of all the public blockchains out in the market right now, Ethereum shows the most promise, thanks mainly to its support for the notion of smart contracts. This 8-video course, purely theoretical, offers learners a quick overview of blockchains and Ethereum, then exploring the purpose and characteristics of the smart contracts they support. Participants will then dive into the Solidity programming language and be introduced to its features, which make it ideally suited to the task of coding Ethereum Smart Contracts. Along the way, you will encounter key tools such as pragmas-version pragmas and experimental pragmas-and comments, both single-line and multi-line. By the end of this course, you will have acquired a firm grasp of what Ethereum and Smart Contracts are, and why the Solidity programming language is best suited to defining Ethereum interactions. Completing the course will prepare you to move on to an even deeper exploration of Solidity, involving the essential natures of types, functions, control structures, and other features supported by the language.

This course examines the most mature and widely used language for coding smart contracts, Solidity. The 12-video series assumes a reasonably broad understanding of Solidity language; you should also be familiar with different types of functions and data structures available, needed here to build a number of decentralized applications (dApps). Begin by refining an application used to conduct a poll, then implement a smart contract which functions as an escrow. Watch how the different types of data structures in the Solidity programming language operate. Explore different types of functions, including the payable functions which collect ether in a smart contract. Next, build a smart contract application which mimics a bank, with customers represented by their Ethereum account addresses, and each account can have an Ether balance. By completing the course labs, you will incorporate all the skills needed to build the back end of any decentralized application. With some additional Javascript knowledge, you need only integrate your front end with your smart contract in order to become a full-stack blockchain developer.

Building applications with real use cases nearly always involves the use of complex data structures such as maps, or structs and control structures such as if-else statements and loops in your Blockchain solutions. In this 11-video course, participants will explore the use of mapping and struct data structures in the Solidity language, as well as covering the looping operations with for, while, and do-while loops. Learn to build a smart contract which can be used to conduct a poll. The demos in this course will help you gain a very broad understanding of the Solidity language, and know how to use complex data structures, access modifiers, require clauses, as well as control structures, to build an application representing a real-life use case. The concluding exercise tests your ability to identify the rules you must follow to access transaction data from a smart contract and initialize a new instance of a struct (SampleStruct), setting two different methods which are supported.

Transferring Ether between Ethereum accounts is the fundamental financial transaction performed by smart contracts for you Blockchain solutions. This detailed, 13-video course continues exploring Ethereum's use of Solidity language by examining the more advanced functions included in smart contracts, specifically the payable functions which allow the contract to receive Ether. Participants explore the use of fallback functions, the simplest forms of payable functions, and then define their own payable functions. Learn what happens when a smart contract has lived out its life and it needs to be destroyed; the Ether it still holds must be handed to another account and the original contract destroyed, but how? Explore the special function called selfdestruct, which deletes the smart contract from the Ethereum network. By the end of this course, you should have acquired a productive understanding of how assignment operations work depending on whether the variables on either side have been created in storage or memory.

In this 12-video course, participants sample various features of the Solidity language, such as the different types which are available; the kinds of functions which can be included within your smart contracts; and the object-oriented concepts that are supported, such as abstract contracts, inheritances, and interfaces. You will survey some of the special operations in Ethereum, which can be coded in Solidity, such as the transfer of Ether and the development tools which are available, such as the Remix IDE (integrated developer environment) and the Truffle Suite. Learn about the array types contained within Solidity-fixed length or dynamic-which are similar to those in other programming languages, and the important differences: no real null types or undefined types, an attribute which results in default values if not explicitly set. By the end of this course, you will have a firm grasp of the concepts and features of the Solidity programming language, and its benefits, as well as its limitations when creating your Blockchain solutions.

Because functions in smart contracts are at the heart of any operation which is performed in the Ethereum network, this 14-video course covers different ways to define functions depending on their use case. Explore function arguments, return types, and access modifiers, before delving into object-oriented concepts: function polymorphism, abstract contracts, how to override functions in derived contracts, inheritance, and different visibility levels: private, internal, external, and public (default). Demonstration models provide a realistic idea of how a function's visibility affects where it can be invoked from; a private variable defined within one smart contract can still be accessed from another contract, as long as its getter function is accessible. As you progress through this course, you will gain a fuller understanding of coding smart contracts by using Solidity for your Blockchain solutions. You will know the types of operations which can incur a gas cost and how these can be limited with access modifiers. You will also learn how to define and use abstract contracts while controlling access to your functions by using the four visibility levels.

This course introduces participants to the cloud-based version of the Remix integrated developer environment (IDE), an environment allowing you to code up, deploy, and then interact with your smart contracts. One reason why Remix is such a popular tool is due to its flexibility; it can deploy smart contracts to a variety of Ethereum networks. This 11-video course helps you learn how to code up a simple smart contract and how this contract can be deployed to a private Ethereum network, provisioned by Remix for testing purposes for your Blockchain solutions. After provisioning another private network using Ganache, you will then use Remix to deploy a contract to that network. Then learn to connect Remix to the MetaMask browser plugin, which itself serves as a wallet for your Ethereum accounts, and enables transactions on a variety of Ethereum networks. By the end of this course, you will have gained a comfortable degree of familiarity with Remix IDE and how it can be used to develop, deploy, and then interact with your smart contracts.