Beginning Blockchain: A Beginner’s Guide to Building Blockchain Solutions

Understand the nuts and bolts of Blockchain, its different flavors with simple use cases, and cryptographic fundamentals. You will also learn some design considerations that can help you build custom solutions.

Beginning Blockchain is a beginner's guide to understanding the core concepts of Blockchain from a technical perspective. By learning the design constructs of different types of Blockchain, you will get a better understanding of building the best solution for specific use cases. The book covers the technical aspects of Blockchain technologies, cryptography, cryptocurrencies, and distributed consensus mechanisms. You will learn how these systems work and how to engineer them to design next-gen business solutions.

• Get a detailed look at how cryptocurrencies work
• Understand the core technical components of Blockchain
• Build a secured Blockchain solution from cryptographic primitives
• Discover how to use different Blockchain platforms and their suitable use cases
• Know the current development status, scope, limitations, and future of Blockchain
  

Chapter 1:  Blockchain Introduction

Chapter Goal: This chapter gives an overview of what Blockchain is all about and how it has evolved. It also gives an insight on its fitment with the ever changing technology trend.

No of pages: 15

Sub -Topics

2.         What is Blockchain

3.         Centralized Vs Distributed systems

4.         Why is Blockchain important

Chapter 2:  How Blockchain Works

Chapter Goal: This chapter is designed to provide in-depth technical understanding on the basic fundamentals that make up to Blockchain. It lays a foundation with prerequisite knowledge with sufficient code examples to help the readers understand and build Blockchain applications.

No of pages: 80

Sub - Topics      

1.         Cryptography (Public Key, Digital Signatures, Hash Functions)

2.         Blockchain Data structure

3.         Blockchain components (Transaction, Mining, Proof of work, Timestamping, Consensus mechanism)

4.          Private and Public Blockchains

Chapter 3:  How Bitcoin Works

No of pages : 70

Sub - Topics:       <

1.         What is Bitcoin and how it works

2.         Bitcoin design evolution

3.         Bitcoin Protocol (Transactions, Network, Cryptography and Consensus)

4.         Bitcoin Client, Keys, addresses and Wallets

5.         Bitcoin Scripts

6.         Building Bitcoin applications

Chapter 4:  The Ethereum Blockchain

Chapter Goal: This chapter demonstrates an alternative protocol "Ethereum" for building decentralized application on Blockchain technology. It explains how to build smart applications on Ethereum Blockchain that are capable of Smart Contract execution.

No of pages: 50

Sub - Topics: 

1.         Overview of Ethereum

2.         Ethereum Protocol

3.         Basics of Solidity Programming Language

4.         Programming Smart Contracts

5.         Developing Ethereum Applications

Chapter 5:  Other Blockchain Flavors

Chapter Goal: This chapter is an effort to provide a sound grip on other open source developments on Blockchain and the readers get an idea on existing Blockchain frameworks and platforms.

No of pages: 25

Sub - Topics: 

1.         Why so many flavors

2.         The Hyperledger Project

3.         BitShares

4.         R3CEV

Chapter 6: Issues, Trends and Future prospects

Chapter Goal: This chapter gives an insights on the limitations of Blockchain, research areas, and a perspective on the future of Blockchain. 

Sub - Topics: 

1.         Challenges with the current Blockchain Protocol

2.         Improvement areas currently under consideration

4.         Future of Blockchain