Mastering Ethereum
by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Gavin Wood
A comprehensive guide for developers, covering the Ethereum protocol, smart contracts, dApps, and the broader Web3 ecosystem. Written by Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Gavin Wood, it is widely considered a foundational text for understanding Ethereum and building on it. The GitHub repository provides the book's content for free.
More resources on Blockchain Fundamentals
Andreas Antonopoulos Website
Andreas M. Antonopoulos collects over 600 free talks and Q&A videos here, alongside his books on Bitcoin and open blockchains. Browsing the archive gives grounded answers to questions about consensus, wallets, custody and protocol design.
freeCodeCamp.org
This non-profit organization provides numerous free coding tutorials and full courses, including extensive content on Python for data science, machine learning, and deep learning. Their YouTube channel features long, comprehensive videos that are well-structured and beginner-friendly.
Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain (First Edition)
Authored by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, the first edition of this seminal work is freely available online via its official GitHub repository. It is universally recognized as a foundational text for understanding Bitcoin's technical underpinnings. It delves into how Bitcoin works, including cryptographic principles, transactions, and various aspects of wallet implementation and security, providing an in-depth technical understanding crucial for robust security practices.
The Complete Security Guide to keep you, your computer, and your crypto safe
A comprehensive, community-vetted guide from the r/CryptoCurrency subreddit covering a broad range of security measures for protecting cryptocurrency assets, personal computers, and online activities. It's an excellent resource for understanding general crypto security best practices.
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies
To really understand what is special about Bitcoin, we need to understand how it works at a technical level. We’ll address the important questions about Bitcoin, such as: How does Bitcoin work? What makes Bitcoin different? How secure are your Bitcoins? How anonymous are Bitcoin users? What determines the price of Bitcoins? Can cryptocurrencies be regulated? What might the future hold? After this course, you’ll know everything you need to be able to separate fact from fiction when reading claims about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. You’ll have the conceptual foundations you need to engineer secure software that interacts with the Bitcoin network. And you’ll be able to integrate ideas from Bitcoin in your own projects. Course Lecturers: Arvind Narayanan, Princeton University All the features of this course are available for free. It does not offer a certificate upon completion.
Blockchain Basics
This first course of the Blockchain specialization provides a broad overview of the essential concepts of blockchain technology – by initially exploring the Bitcoin protocol followed by the Ethereum protocol – to lay the foundation necessary for developing applications and programming. You will be equipped with the knowledge needed to create nodes on your personal Ethereum blockchain, create accounts, unlock accounts, mine, transact, transfer Ethers, and check balances. You will learn about the decentralized peer-to-peer network, an immutable distributed ledger and the trust model that defines a blockchain. This course enables you to explain basic components of a blockchain (transaction, block, block header, and the chain) its operations (verification, validation, and consensus model) underlying algorithms, and essentials of trust (hard fork and soft fork). Content includes the hashing and cryptography foundations indispensable to blockchain programming, which is the focus of two subsequent specialization courses, Smart Contracts and Decentralized Applications (Dapps). You will work on a virtual machine image, specifically created for this course, to build an Ethereum test chain and operate on the chain. This hands-on activity will help you understand the workings of a blockchain, its transactions, blocks and mining. Main concepts are delivered through videos, demos and hands-on exercises.