Thread by @ianjohnlee

How I learned Solidity programming in a month:

In April during lockdowns, I decided to invest in learning Solidity. Given that I haven't seriously coded beyond HTML in almost 20 years, it was daunting 😨

But it doesn't have to be hard or scary to get started.

Here's how 👇

1/ Latest Solidity Documentation

Here's all the latest dev stuff/updates to @ethereum Solidity. I search for things in here a lot when I'm trying to see how to do something very specific. Don't try to read this like a book. Just search for things in it.

docs.soliditylang.org

2/ @udemy Solidity Course

For me this was really great and fun. Starts from first principles and teaches via real smart contract examples. It cost only $14.99 and I did it in 3 weeks very casually. You could do it in less than a week (I have a day job!).

udemy.com/course/blockch…

3/ @OpenZeppelin Github of audited Solidity contract templates

Fully audited, battle tested, and well documented. ERC20 and ERC721 (NFT) token contracts and more. Because they're so well explained, it's very easy follow once you understand the basics!

github.com/OpenZeppelin/o…

4/ Crypto project Githubs and developer docs

One of the beautiful things about crypto is that all of this is open source, so you can read through other projects' full code that in some cases have billions of $$$ in total value locked (TVL). I learned so much from these:

4a/ @BalancerLabs: docs.balancer.finance

4b/ @UniswapProtocol: uniswap.org/docs/v2

4c/ @compoundfinance (e.g., governance): compound.finance/docs/governance

4d/ @synthetix_io: docs.synthetix.io

4e/ Maker (e.g., how to interact with DAI): docs.makerdao.com/smart-contract…

4f/ You can also directly read the code of contracts deployed on mainnet.

For example, here are @BalancerLabs' contracts: docs.balancer.finance/smart-contract…

Then go to @etherscan, search (here is Balancer's top level Factory contract), and see the code there: etherscan.io/address/0x9424…

5/ Lastly, Remix is super easy for rapidly coding, prototyping, and testing your Solidity smart contracts functions, all within your browser. No need to learn or set anything else up until you're doing more sophisticated things (e.g., like building a UI).

remix.ethereum.org

6/ I hope that's helps and gets more people started! See? It wasn't that scary 😅

That was enough to get off the ground. Now I'm able to learn new things everyday by reading and talking to smarter people.

I wish someone had shared this with me! If I can do it, so can you 💪

7/ And if you end up building something awesome that you want to take into the world, DM me!

Note: Studied art, software design & economics in college—was a front-end designer & JavaScript coder when I was 19 but that was a *very* long time ago & didn’t continue as I went into finance for 15+ yrs

Technical, product & design mind but outdated coding skills prior to this

Note 2: It helps if you understand programming basics, particularly the basics of object oriented programming like Java/JavaScript, which I did but my skills were 20 years outdated.

You can learn this on @Codecademy for free in days:

codecademy.com