Check out a free preview of the full A Tour of Web 3: Ethereum & Smart Contracts with Solidity course:
The "Introduction" Lesson is part of the full, A Tour of Web 3: Ethereum & Smart Contracts with Solidity course featured in this preview video. Here's what you'd learn in this lesson:

ThePrimeagen begins the course with a brief overview of Ethereum and a walkthrough of the course outline. The course will start with a basic "hello world" example and then pick up the pace with a lot of coding examples and the exploring of different types of contracts.

Get Unlimited Access Now

Transcript from the "Introduction" Lesson

[00:00:00]
>> I'm pretty excited to do this course, you guys also get my Christmas mustache. So, I grow a mustache while doing advent of code. And so it's unusual that I have a mustache, but now you will get the full experience of both crypto and a mustache. Which I believe makes me actually even better at picking NFT's is when you grow mustache.

[00:00:19] So, I'm pretty excited about this. So, this is kind of the year of crypto. I think everyone can kind of agree that this is the year of crypto. See me personally, I thought that was the year of crypto. I remember that year. That was fantastic. Everyone was buying it.

[00:00:31] January was hot and then everything died off and no one cared about it for many years and now it's gone crazy, right? By the way, I did buy here at this nice top part. I did sell nice and low, I just, just classic buy high, sell low. I also had this really great joke.

[00:00:46] I was gonna make about this guy who became a millionaire off of doge coin, and I was gonna call him slum, doge millionaire. And then I found out that he made a Twitter account and it really ruined my joke. And so I feel very upset about this. So I think I'm gonna quit that means for the rest of my life.

[00:01:01] I was actually going to even make another meme about quitting memes, but then I realized that's kind of defeating the purpose of quitting meme so I didn't do that. Anyway, so I'm going to be here to talk to you about crypto, and you will have to excuse the lambo while I hit you with some knowledge.

[00:01:16] Which is the most important part of understanding crypto. But here's the real deal is that I am not gonna try to sell you on anything, I don't think crypto's 100% the future and 100% not the future. I think it's actually just a pretty interesting tech. It has a lot that's gonna have to change, right?

[00:01:34] Like no one thought in 1999 that Everything with the web has already arrived, right? There was a lot of change between then and even three years after that. And so I do think that we're just at this really unique spot with it, where we don't actually know what's gonna happen?

[00:01:50] We don't know what the future is going to be. We don't know how much of it is going to actually affect our daily lives. And so I think it's just really fun. I think every developer should at least have some working knowledge of what it could be. And think of some fun ideas and ultimately, you just might be able to make something that's worth a lot of money.

[00:02:05] I know that there's these crypto punks that are 64 by 64 pixelated arts and one of them sold for $100 million. So, I don't know really what's going on, but it's just a unique world right now. The goal of this course is not to teach you how to build a Aethalium react app, right?

[00:02:21] It's not going to be focusing on making a website while lightly integrating with Aethalium or any of these technologies. Really what it's going to be is building a really solid foundation such that you will be able to build anything you want to build. And that's really my goal here, is not just to just lightly do it, but to show you every part of it that I can so that when you leave exactly how to assemble the pieces that are important for you.

[00:02:49] Know where the dangers lie and ultimately be able to build something that's just more complex than a simple hey, here's a crypto zombie. And so by the way, crypto zombies is pretty good tutorial. And so who am I? I am probably best known for using Vim. That's I know it's pretty cool skill to be known for a lot of people.

[00:03:08] They grow up hoping that they could be known for such things, but they don't get to be known for that. I have a Twitch, I have a YouTube and I work at a startup we ship DVDs are around the United States. You may have heard of us were called Netflix.

[00:03:23] We've been doing it for a while now. I really think who knows? Maybe we'll ship DVDs to other places. We have lots of places to expand very excited about it. And here is the course outline I'm kind of moving fast because I don't want to do a long intro.

[00:03:37] I know a proper intro should be 45 minutes long, but I want to make it shorter today because there's just too much to cover. So the first thing we're gonna do is just do the Hello World Contract. I want to make sure everybody has the right tools in place that they have seen kind of the basics of it.

[00:03:51] So, we're gonna build the Hello World Contract. We're gonna test it, we're gonna deploy it. We're gonna talk to it from a webpage. So we're gonna kinda go to the four spots you should know when developing Tech for Ethereum. And yes I am when I say when we do web three and a tour I'm more specifically looking at Ethereum.

[00:04:11] There's a lot of directions we could go, we could talk about layer two. We could talk about salona the oddest, chain ever created because it's programmed in Rust, which means I could tell you about rust the entire time without actually doing anything. So, it does seem pretty tempting.

[00:04:25] But we're gonna start with the simplest one, because it's just very easy to work with. Two we're gonna go a little bit more complex contract. We're even gonna launch it on Rinkeby, which is a live test net, that you can access pretty much anywhere around the world. Three we're gonna go to a more complex contract.

[00:04:41] And unfortunately this one gets, this is where like the weeds of working on the blockchain really start happening. If you don't understand these two statements, hopefully at the end of the course you will understand these two statements. Both of these should be very obvious if you understand them.

[00:04:58] If they're not obvious, then don't worry they will become obvious hopefully. And then we'll do more testing deploying. And then lastly we're going to solve some of the bigger problems which is how do you update your contracts? How do you get something large eyes of your contract? I even had the person that created the EIP 2535.

[00:05:20] Try to make sure that I talk about this. I was like, don't worry, we're talking about this. I met with him and it was a lot of fun. And so I hope you're ready. This is hopefully gonna be a little bit different of a course because we're going to be primarily coding and going pretty fast.

[00:05:35] So, I hope everyone's ready to keep up, build a lot of things. And if you don't build a lot of things you just wanna watch that's fine. But I am more of a person that believes you learn by doing not by just simply watching somebody. And so that's I think the best way to learn to do it because and another thing I will not be doing today is I will not be going over how to declare a variable if statements for loops, inheritance.

[00:05:59] I just assume everyone here knows how to program, and if you see a sea based language, you can kind of go okay, yeah, that's that. Yeah, I get that. That's that Okay. Because we just want to go fast. And I know I kind of alluded to this. But a theorem is a real it has a really simple language with it.

[00:06:16] You'll see it, you'll just immediately understand it, right? There's nothing super complex about it. Some of the concepts get harder and some of the technicalities get harder, but the base part of it is super easy. It's also super popular. Everybody knows what Aetherium is like you even turn on the stock channel and they'll have like a Bitcoin and Aetherium ticker.

[00:06:33] So it's like it's popular enough. It's like the zeitgeist of the smart contract world today. Will it be tomorrow? I don't know. Netscape Navigator was really awesome and so is AOL. I can't tell you what's going to happen. Is it the Netscape Navigator of today? It could be.

[00:06:49] But I also am going to assume that you guys are familiar with TypeScript or have enough working knowledge that if I said, Hey, go yarn install this, you're not going to be like, what's an yarn? I don't understand what you're trying to tell me. So hopefully everyone's kind of at that level because or else we'll spend too much time just getting things set up and.

[00:07:09] I also not going to use the Ethereum IDE. There is an editor that's specifically designed around a theorem that adds a bunch of convenience to it. And one of the reasons why I don't want to do that is just the same reason why I don't like people, especially when you're new to something not using things like VS code or IntelliJ, but actually trying to go down to just the basics.

[00:07:28] Cuz often when problems arise and you've been using something that abstracts your environment, you don't know why they happen. You're just like it's broken. I don't get it. Why is it broken here? Why can't I call this function? What's happening? You miss out on a lot of the core concepts by abstracting yourself.

[00:07:43] You guys can use VS code or whatever you want to use. But I'll be flying on vim, I mean remember the whole being known for vim thing. And lastly we'll be doing a lot of debugging if a problem does arise. Now, some of them I have planned some of them I don't have planned, they It just happened.

[00:07:59] And console log will be, of course, our primary debugging tool, the greatest of all debugging tools, known demand. But most importantly, this is the thing that you really have to understand, everything we do today we're doing it first try. So, I hope everybody's ready to first try hang that up..

[00:08:16] That's one of the best parts of coding live is it's always the first try. And if you guys are interested I've already I've taught a course here on front end masters about vim it was fantastic. Lots of separability from mark on this one if this course is going to be great now he think I think he thinks it's great now.

[00:08:32] And then the second one which for whatever reason the image didn't load. It loads and then doesn't load, which I also did one on developer productivity. So, if you're wondering how I'm like switching between folders or looking up stuff about say go Lang i could just type in In this.

[00:08:46] How am I doing all those things? Have all those things done on another course called developer productivity? Pretty fantastic pacing. I did want to say we're going to start off slow, like I said, with the hello world, but each thing we do is going to get significantly more complicated.