20 Blockchain development learning resources

The last year (2016/2017)  in Pragmatic Coders has been a huge step forward in terms of blockchain development. Working on several projects (two already deployed to Mainnet) we have grown more experienced and accumulated a number of learning resources. We would like to share them with blockchain enthusiasts, particularly developers. Useful for both rookies and more advanced users. We hope you will find them helpful.

Blockchain

What is Blockchain Technology? A Step-by-Step Guide For Beginners – a quite thorough introduction to what blockchain is and the opportunities it gives.

Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake – a nice explanation of two most popular types of consensus algorithms.

Ethereum 

Etherscan – one of the most popular among block explorers (a search engine for finding and verifying the transactions on Ethereum Blockchain). Our teams made it as their preferred choice.

ETH Gas Station – provides you with actual statistics regarding gas prices and transaction confirmation times. Look into a quite descriptive FAQ section.

Ethereum Converter – ever wondered how much Wei is your 10 Szabo worth? 😉 It is a handy tool to convert between different Ethereum units.

Smart Contract: An Introduction – as the name implies, the article explains basic concepts around Smart Contracts.

Ethereum in 25 Minutes – Vitalik Buterin presents the technical aspects Ethereum in less than half an hour. He goes through all of the concepts, including Smart Contracts or Gas.

An Introduction to Ethereum and Smart Contracts – a thorough article where you learn about Ethereum as a programmable blockchain. Apart from deep dive into used algorithms and data structures, it contains a basic Smart Contract code written in Solidity.

DAPPs (Decentralized Applications), Solidity, Smart Contracts

Solidity docs –  a base source of information regarding the Solidity language, the most popular for writing Smart Contracts.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Smart Contracts in Ethereum – another guide for writing Smart Contracts. A huge plus is an explanation of how to deploy them to the testnet network.

DAPPs for beginners – a tutorial which, step by step, explains how to build a Decentralized Application on Ethereum. It is not finished and covers a fair amount of work.

Ethereum development tools – a compilation of Ethereum development tools. You do not need anything else tool-wise to kick off the development of your dapp. In our projects we use: Geth, Parity, MetaMask, Web3.js, Truffle, testrpc, Solc, Solium and Zeppelin.

Udemy Ethereum DAPP, Udemy Blockchain Developer, Udemy Ethereum Developer – A set of complete courses on Ethereum Blockchain development including an end-to-end tutorial on how to create a functioning DAPP. Also, quite cheap if you spot a discount on Udemy.

Ethereum Development resources list – a compilation of tutorials aimed at building DAPPs. Unlike other mentioned here, you can find how to use Java or NodeJS to integrate with Ethereum or which offline databases can be used in Decentralized Applications.

Bitcoin

Mastering Bitcoin 2nd Edition – Second Edition of the famous book written by Andreas M. Antonopoulos. Available to read on github.

Programming Bitcoin transactions – the site contains a wide range of materials focusing on programming Bitcoin transactions. It covers most of, if not all, the development topics.