learn-co-curriculum / intro-to-programming-blockchain-jsong

Introduction to Programming Blockchain

Welcome to Programming Blockchain with Jimmy Song.

GitHub Permissions [IMPORTANT]

If you read nothing else, read this section. This platform was designed with beginners in mind and because of some of the git magic we take on user's behalf we ask for a lot of permissions when you authenticate with GitHub. Therefore, we strongly suggest you create a new GitHub account for this course. To avoid any confusion you should sign out of GitHub right now if you have an active session. When prompted in the next lesson to OAuth, you can use alternate email or even [email protected] to create a fresh account. We are actively working on moving to a better system that requires less aggressively scopes, but this is a current weakness of Learn.

Welcome to Learn.co

Programming Blockchain has been running for many months but it is new to Learn.co so let's take this opportunity to orient you to the platform. Please give the following items a read over...

Navigating the curriculum

We provide easy navigation to the next lesson with a button on the right panel below the lights, but if you'd like to go back or jump ahead lessons you can navigate between sections using the curriculum tree in the upper left corner:

Running Tests

Programming Bitcoin is a test driven learning approach. In previous Programming Bitcoin classes, students have downloaded the pb-exercises repo and use the Jupyter Notebooks locally to manipulate example code and understand concepts. However, the tests run against other python files in the library, not the notebook itself. Learn.co natively supports Jupyter Notebooks. There won't be a need to have the files locally or leave the notebook. You can run the tests with the blue button labeled Run Test (shown below). If you have failures or errors we will give you a button to view your output underneath the red light on the right panel.

We've interspersed many of the test driven exercises (labeled as such) with the coding examples, but if you are looking for the test driven exercises a good rule of thumb is that the stubbed out methods end with a pass line. The tests running against the notebook can be found in the test/index_test.py file.

Looking at the code on GitHub

If you would like to look at the canonical repository you can click on the Octocat icon:

We will be forking all of the Jupyter Notebooks you view, which means you will have access to those repos on your account. When viewing the canonical repository, if you replace the learn-co-students portion of the url github.com/learn-co-students/repo-name with your GitHub username (github.com/your_username/repo-name) you can view your forked version. You can also navigate to your GitHub profile.

Solutions

If you are having a hard time solving a lab, we've provided a solution.ipynb notebook within the repo that has the answers. Things move pretty quickly during the seminar so don't feel bashful about getting some hints from that notebook.

This is new so feedback is very welcome

Hosting Programming Bitcoin on Learn is still new and so feedback is very welcome. We want to make this as great an experience as possible so please don't be shy with suggestions or raising bugs. It's all appreciated.