Author: Jimmy Song
Published in: O’Reilly Media
ISBN: 978-1492-0-3149-9
File Type: pdf
File Size: 13 MB
Language: English
Author: Jimmy Song
Published in: O’Reilly Media
ISBN: 978-1492-0-3149-9
File Type: pdf
File Size: 13 MB
Language: English
Published in: O’Reilly Media
ISBN: 978-1492-0-3149-9
File Type: pdf
File Size: 13 MB
Language: English
Description
Programming Bitcoin book will teach you the technology of Bitcoin at a fundamental level. It doesn’t cover the monetary, economic, or social dynamics of Bitcoin, but knowing how Bitcoin works under the hood should give you greater insight into what’s possible. There’s a tendency to hype Bitcoin and blockchain without really understanding what’s going on; Programming Bitcoin book is meant to be an antidote to that tendency. After all, there are lots of books about Bitcoin, covering the history and the economic aspects and giving technical descriptions. The aim of Programming Bitcoin book is to get you to understand Bitcoin by coding all of the components necessary for a Bitcoin library. The library is not meant to be exhaustive or efficient. The aim of the library is to help you learn.
Programming Bitcoin book is for programmers who want to learn how Bitcoin works by coding it themselves. You will learn Bitcoin by coding the “bare metal” stuff in a Bitcoin library you will create from scratch. This is not a reference book where you can look up the specification for a particular feature. The material from Programming Bitcoin book has been largely taken from my two-day seminar where I teach developers all about Bitcoin. The material has been refined extensively, as I’ve taught this course more than 20 times, to over 400 people as of this writing. By the time you’re done with the book, you’ll not only be able to create transactions, but also get all the data you need from peers and send the transactions over the network. It covers everything needed to accomplish this, including the math, parsing, network connectivity, and block validation.
A prerequisite for Programming Bitcoin book is that you know programming—Python, in particular. The library itself is written in Python 3, and a lot of the exercises can be done in a controlled environment like a Jupyter notebook. An intermediate knowledge of Python is preferable, but even a beginning knowledge is probably sufficient to get a lot of the concepts. Some knowledge of math is required, especially for Chapters 1 and 2. These chapters introduce mathematical concepts probably not familiar to those who didn’t major in mathematics. Math knowledge around algebra level should suffice to understand the new concepts and to code the exercises covered in those chapters.
General computer science knowledge, for example, of hash functions, will come in handy but is not strictly necessary to complete the exercises in Programming Bitcoin. How Is the Book Arranged? Programming Bitcoin is split into 14 chapters. Each is meant to build on the previous one as the Bitcoin library gets built from scratch all the way to the end. Roughly speaking, Chapters 1–4 establish the mathematical tools that we need; Chapters 5–8 cover transactions, which are the fundamental unit of Bitcoin; and Chapters 9–12 cover blocks and networking. The last two chapters cover some advanced topics but don’t actually require you to write code.
Chapters 1 and 2 cover some math that we need. Finite fields and elliptic curves are needed to understand elliptic curve cryptography in Chapter 3. After we’ve established the public key cryptography at the end of Chapter 3, Chapter 4 adds parsing and serialization, which are how cryptographic primitives are stored and transmitted. Chapter 5 covers the transaction structure. Chapter 6 goes into the smart contract language behind Bitcoin, called Script. Chapter 7 builds on all the previous chapters, showing how to validate and create transactions based on the elliptic curve cryptography from the first four chapters. Chapter 8 establishes how pay-to-script-hash (p2sh) works, which is a way to make more powerful smart contracts.
Chapter 9 covers blocks, which are groups of ordered transactions. Chapter 10 covers network communication in Bitcoin. Chapters 11 and 12 go into how a light client, or software without access to the entire blockchain, might request and broadcast data to and from nodes that store the entire blockchain. Chapter 13 covers Segwit, a backward-compatible upgrade introduced in 2017, and Chapter 14 provides suggestions for further study. These chapters are not strictly necessary, but are included as a way to give you a taste of what more there is to learn. Chapters 1–12 have exercises that require you to build up the library from scratch.
The answers are in Appendix A and in the corresponding chapter directory in the GitHub repo. You will be writing many Python classes and building toward not just validating transactions/blocks, but also creating your own transactions and broadcasting them on the network. The last exercise in Chapter 12 specifically asks you to connect to another node on the testnet network, calculate what you can spend, construct and sign a transaction of your devising, and broadcast that on the network. The first 11 chapters essentially prepare you for this exercise. There will be a lot of unit tests that your code will need to pass. The book has been designed this way so you can do the “fun” part of coding. To aid your progress, we will be looking at a lot of code and diagrams throughout.
Who Is Programming Bitcoin Book For?
Programming Bitcoin book is for programmers who want to learn how Bitcoin works by coding it themselves. You will learn Bitcoin by coding the “bare metal” stuff in a Bitcoin library you will create from scratch. This is not a reference book where you can look up the specification for a particular feature. The material from Programming Bitcoin book has been largely taken from my two-day seminar where I teach developers all about Bitcoin. The material has been refined extensively, as I’ve taught this course more than 20 times, to over 400 people as of this writing. By the time you’re done with the book, you’ll not only be able to create transactions, but also get all the data you need from peers and send the transactions over the network. It covers everything needed to accomplish this, including the math, parsing, network connectivity, and block validation.
What Do I Need to Know about Programming Bitcoin?
A prerequisite for Programming Bitcoin book is that you know programming—Python, in particular. The library itself is written in Python 3, and a lot of the exercises can be done in a controlled environment like a Jupyter notebook. An intermediate knowledge of Python is preferable, but even a beginning knowledge is probably sufficient to get a lot of the concepts. Some knowledge of math is required, especially for Chapters 1 and 2. These chapters introduce mathematical concepts probably not familiar to those who didn’t major in mathematics. Math knowledge around algebra level should suffice to understand the new concepts and to code the exercises covered in those chapters.
General computer science knowledge, for example, of hash functions, will come in handy but is not strictly necessary to complete the exercises in Programming Bitcoin. How Is the Book Arranged? Programming Bitcoin is split into 14 chapters. Each is meant to build on the previous one as the Bitcoin library gets built from scratch all the way to the end. Roughly speaking, Chapters 1–4 establish the mathematical tools that we need; Chapters 5–8 cover transactions, which are the fundamental unit of Bitcoin; and Chapters 9–12 cover blocks and networking. The last two chapters cover some advanced topics but don’t actually require you to write code.
Chapters 1 and 2 cover some math that we need. Finite fields and elliptic curves are needed to understand elliptic curve cryptography in Chapter 3. After we’ve established the public key cryptography at the end of Chapter 3, Chapter 4 adds parsing and serialization, which are how cryptographic primitives are stored and transmitted. Chapter 5 covers the transaction structure. Chapter 6 goes into the smart contract language behind Bitcoin, called Script. Chapter 7 builds on all the previous chapters, showing how to validate and create transactions based on the elliptic curve cryptography from the first four chapters. Chapter 8 establishes how pay-to-script-hash (p2sh) works, which is a way to make more powerful smart contracts.
Chapter 9 covers blocks, which are groups of ordered transactions. Chapter 10 covers network communication in Bitcoin. Chapters 11 and 12 go into how a light client, or software without access to the entire blockchain, might request and broadcast data to and from nodes that store the entire blockchain. Chapter 13 covers Segwit, a backward-compatible upgrade introduced in 2017, and Chapter 14 provides suggestions for further study. These chapters are not strictly necessary, but are included as a way to give you a taste of what more there is to learn. Chapters 1–12 have exercises that require you to build up the library from scratch.
The answers are in Appendix A and in the corresponding chapter directory in the GitHub repo. You will be writing many Python classes and building toward not just validating transactions/blocks, but also creating your own transactions and broadcasting them on the network. The last exercise in Chapter 12 specifically asks you to connect to another node on the testnet network, calculate what you can spend, construct and sign a transaction of your devising, and broadcast that on the network. The first 11 chapters essentially prepare you for this exercise. There will be a lot of unit tests that your code will need to pass. The book has been designed this way so you can do the “fun” part of coding. To aid your progress, we will be looking at a lot of code and diagrams throughout.
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