protofire / blockchain-learning-path

A suggested learning path for blockchain development

Blockchain Learning Path

An opinionated learning path for getting into speed with Blockchain (specially Ethereum). This is a work in progress, please open an issue or send a pull request to help improving it.

Pre-requisites

Besides a programming background, this path assumes that the reader is at least a little comfortable with:

• Public key cryptography
  1. Watch Public Key Cryptography. (Est. time: 7 minutes)
  2. Read What is Public-key Cryptography?. (Est. time: 4 minutes)
• Digital signatures
  1. Read Cryptography Digital Signitures. (Est. time: 10 minutes)
  2. Watch What are Digital Signatures and How Do They Work? (Est. time: 3 minutes)
• Cryptographic hashing
  1. Watch What is Hashing on the Blockchain? (Est. time: 5 minutes)
  2. Read What is Hashing in Blockchain?. (Est. time: 9 minutes)

Blockchain

1. Read Blockchain Explained. (Est.time: 26 minutes)
2. Read What is Blockchain?. (Est.time: 13 minutes)
3. Watch Blockchain - A visual demo. (Est. time: 18 minutes)

Bitcoin

1. Read How the Bitcoin protocol actually works. (Est. time: 45 minutes)
2. Watch this video (lighter than the previous article but useful to solidify your knowledge). (Est. time: 26 minutes)

Ethereum

Theory

1. Read How does Ethereum work, anyway? (Est. time: 38 minutes)
2. Read this article on smart contracts development. (Est. time: 15 minutes)
3. Learn about hardhat Hardhat Documentation
4. Read the Web3 Documentation / Ethers Documentation
5. Book Mastering Ethereum
6. Set of learning resources from ethereum.org

Practice

1. Learn Ethereum development by making a Zombie Game (Est. time: 8 hs)
2. Read and make and example: Pet shop tutorial
3. Time-locked Wallets: An Introduction to Ethereum Smart Contracts
4. The Ultimate ENS and ĐApp Tutorial
5. Ultimate Introduction to Ethereum Ðapp Development (Est. time: 4 hs)
6. Ethernaut is a Web3/Solidity based wargame for those interested in learning ethereum

Courses

1. Do this course Ethereum and Solidity: The Complete Developer's Guide (Est. time: 24 hs)
2. Free tutorial Learning Solidity
3. Introduction to Smart Contract Development with Solidity (Est. time: 2 hs)
4. FreeCodeCamp course Learn Blockchain, Solidity, and Full Stack Web3 Development with JavaScript (32 hours)

Concepts

0. Crypto vocabulary
1. Blockchain Oracles, Explained (Est. time: 4 minutes)
2. ABI (Est. time: 15 minutes)
3. Keccak256 (Est. time: 15 minutes)
4. Random numbers (Est. time: 5 minutes)
5. Velocity of Tokens (Est. time: 9 minutes)
6. Gas (Est. time: 11-14 minutes)
7. Weth
8. Decentralized Finance (DeFi):
   • Intro to DeFi - Introduction to DeFi and its main ideas.
   • Awesome Decentralized Finance
   • DeFi Prime - Curated directory of DeFi projects.
9. Smart Contracts

Under the hood

1. Inside an Ethereum transaction
2. Diving Into the Ethereum VM

Best Practices

• Consensys best practices - This document provides a baseline knowledge of security considerations for intermediate Solidity programmers. It is maintained by ConsenSys Diligence, and the broader Ethereum community.
• Solidity Patterns - A compilation of patterns and best practices.

Libraries

• dapp-bin - Ethereum repo providing implementations for many common data structures and utilities in Solidity, Serpent and LLL.
• Solidity Collections - Collections of code snippets and utility libraries.
• OpenZeppelin - Framework to build secure smart contracts.

Examples

• Solidity By Example - Contract examples from the official docs.

Ethereum vs. Bitcoin

• Some key differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum - Features and differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Substrate

• Initiate a Forkless Runtime Upgrade - Forkless Runtime Upgrade useful for initial setups and parachains' CI/CD pipelines.

Smart Contract Standards

The Ethereum Request for Comment repository

• ERCs - Ethereum Improvement Proposals

Tokens

• ERC-20 - Token contract for fungible assets.
• ERC-721 - Token standard for non-fungible assets.
• ERC-1155 - Multi Token Standard that aims to take the best from previous standards to create a fungibility-agnostic and gas-efficient token contract.
• ERC-918 - Mineable Token Standard.

Others

• ERC-165 - Creates a standard method to publish and detect what interfaces a smart contract implements.
• ERC-725 - A standard interface for a simple proxy account.
• ERC-173 - A standard interface for ownership of contracts.

Toolbox

List of tools curated by Protofire team to better apply best practices to the Protocol and DApps development projects.

General

• eth-cli - CLI tools.
• REPL - Solidity REPL.
• Remix - Online realtime compiler and runtime.

Audit

• Static and dynamic code analysis

Utility

• solhint - Solidity linter that provides security, style guide and best practice rules for smart contract validation.
• solium - Linter to identify and fix style & security issues in Solidity smart contracts.
• sol-tester - Utilities for building, linking and testing contracts using go-ethereum and the simulated chain.
• solidity-coverage - Code coverage tool.
• TypeChain - TypeScript bindings for Ethereum Smart Contracts.

Miscellaneous

Newsletters

• Week in Ethereum News - Ethereum news and links, layer 1, layer 2, client releases, stuff for developers, interviews, podcasts, videos, talks, etc
• Reddit: /r/ethereum/ - Reddit about next-generation platform for decentralised applications.
• Reddit: /r/ethdev - Reddit about ethereum-related dev talk: Contracts, DApps, Wallets, Clients, Infrastructure, Tooling, UIs, Patterns, and others.
• Ethereum Research - Civilized discussion furthering Ethereum research

Talks

• Understanding Blockchain function - Say hello to the decentralized economy. (Est. time: 15 minutes)

Videos

• DeFi from Finematics - Educational videos on DeFi (Decentralized Finance).

blockchain-learning-path's Issues

Invalid/Deleted link under Blockchain

The link under Blockchain > 1. What is Blockchain? is no longer valid (the article was deleted by the author).

A suggested alternative (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blockchain.asp)

Block chain

Fav

Update link

The 6. Gas link under the heading Concepts is dead.

Storage on Eth blockchain

This article explained how Storage works in the eth blockchain, and I think it should be included in the list. It solved a lot of confusion for me, especially about which of the things are global and which are stored on blocks.

Getting Deep Into Ethereum: How Data Is Stored In Ethereum

Crypto path

Dead link for Pet Shop tutorial on Truffle website

The current link is dead, the correct one is as follow: https://www.trufflesuite.com/tutorial

SmartCheck deprecation

SmartCheck project has been deprecated since 2020 as stated in their README https://github.com/smartdec/smartcheck. Their online version has been shut down since then but it is mentioned in the learning path here.

We should probably replace it with some code analyzer from https://consensys.github.io/smart-contract-best-practices/security-tools/static-and-dynamic-analysis/ or any other tool based on Protofire's preference.

Truffle docs link changed anyway is gonna be discontinued

Hi Pablo,

Also, the link to Truffle documentation (Ethereum > Theory > item 3) has changed from

https://truffleframework.com/

to

https://trufflesuite.com/docs/

Anyway, if you read the black banner on the top in the second link and follow the link on the banner, it seems that Truffle (and Ganache) is discontinued

Blockchain

Ethereum vs. Bitcoin link down

The blog post about "Features and differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum." pointing to https://vimba.co/blog/post/bitcoin-vs-ethereum is down.

I could find it (partially?) using the web archive => https://web.archive.org/web/20200929012506/https://vimba.co/blog/post/bitcoin-vs-ethereum. Still, we should probably look for a more up to date blog post that covers it ? Just update the link pointing to the web archive ?

Private Blockchain Framework Resources

Please consider adding helpful resources available on Hyperledger, Corda, etc. frameworks!

Needed alternative materials for videos

Visualizing Roadmap

Can we create a roadmap graph like in Python Developer Roadmap? It will be better to demonstrate all roadmap.

Second item link in Ethereum Theory has changed

Hi,

The link on
Ethereum > Theory > 2. Read this article on smart contracts development. (Est. time: 15 minutes)

has changed the domain and the new link is:
https://blog.openzeppelin.com/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-smart-contracts-in-ethereum-848f08001f05