sethdford / 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)
• 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)

Blockchain

1. Read Blockchain Explained. (Est.time: 26 minutes)
2. 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. Read the Truffle Documentation / Hardhat Documentation
4. Read the Web3 Documentation / Ethers Documentation
5. Book Mastering Ethereum

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)

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: 5 minutes)
7. Weth
8. Decentralized Finance (DeFi):
   • Awesome Decentralized Finance
   • DeFi Prime - Curated directory of DeFi projects.

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.

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-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

• SmartCheck - Online tool for checking smart contracts for vulnerabilities and bad practices.

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)