Category: Blockchain

Author: Siraj Raval

ISBN: 978-1491924549

Publisher: O’Reilly – Safari Books

Published: August 2016

Price: Kindle $US20, Paperback $19.95

Raval writes for application developers interested in the capacity of the blockchain to underpin distributed applications. He provides excellent explanations of the evolution of the technology and its implication in terms of how applications operate and the impact those modes of operation have on various business models.

He maps out the various BitCoin technologies and components of the BitCoin ecosystem and discusses the political beliefs that underpin preferences for certain approaches. This is valuable for strategic planners in corporations, government as well as academics researching the area.

He discusses separately the decentralisation of various aspects of technology such as bandwidth, asset registration and processing capacity and then pulls all that together with a discussion of the practical implications of that.

Thus a serious foundation for the principles underpinning distributed application is built up before he touches the topic of specific platforms or presents a line of pseudo code.

By Chapter 3 he has the reader building their first dApp and then moves in Chapter 4 to exploring the operation of the first distributed marketplace, the Open Bazaar.

By interweaving practical technical development with real world considerations he provides a path to market that will suit most hands on developers.

From there on he introduces one technology after another, outlining its operation, implications, installation and manipulation.

This is a hands on book for real world developers who want to get immersed in the capabilities of distributed applications, quickly.

It is beautifully produced with code blocks, examples and illustrations all carefully laid out and presented to maximum effect.

At 18 months old, some of the technologies have moved on a version or two, but the rapid immersion approach ensures that you can follow Raval into a topic and then quickly catch up with the latest developments.

O’Reilly is selling it as a contemporary work, at $US20 for the Kindle version and $US19.50 for the paperback it is clearly aimed at meeting the current needs of active programmers. With the rapid move from concept to hands-on implementation, this is not a book for planners or strategists, though if you find a copy in the lunch room, you will enjoy the introductions to any of the topics that interest you.

You can buy the book directly by clicking the picture of the cover above.

Author: Andreas M. Antonopolous

ISBN: 978-1491954386

Publisher: O’Reilly – Safari Books

Published: June 2017

The second edition of this text is aimed directly at software developers and programmers but many technically savvy readers who are not coders report that it helped them understand the technology much better than any of the more general introductions.

It deals in detail with the requirements of coding distributed apps and software to take advantage of the blockchain. To achieve this, it describes in detail how each of the components work before delving into the code itself.

While the background and the introduction to each concept is general, the examples are all in Python and C++. Most programmers will find that the examples are translatable to the code of their choice but If that represents a serious challenge, you may need to look elsewhere.

The book evolved from a published set of documents on GitHub and the many participants who contributed to the evolution of the text are acknowledged up front. As with all collaborative projects the maturity that comes with the robust use, testing and feedback shows in the quality of the examples and the depth of the discussion around challenges and reasons for things being developed in particular ways.

There is nothing shrill or hyped about this text, it is considered, well reviewed and recently updated.

At $US11.95 for the Kindle edition and $US21.53 for the paperback this is a full-priced text, but it represents real value for money. I thoroughly recommend it as a solid technical overview and a good guide for developers and programmers serious about considering a move into distributed application development.

Author: Melanie Swan

ISBN: 9781491920497

Publisher: O’Reilly – Safari Books

Published: February 2015

O’Reilly has been publishing technical books for decades and has established a reputation for accuracy, timeliness and depth that is unparalleled in the market. BLueprint for a New Economy lives up to this reputation and covers the philosophical, economic and technical implications of the technology in great depth.

The one limitation of the book is its age: At three years old in a fast moving are like this it is seriously in need of an update. While the underlying technology and its implications have not changed, it is frustrating to read facts and figures that an educated layperson knows are wrong peppered throughout the text. While this remains a valuable reference, I am not recommending it as an introductory text for that reason.

If you are comfortable with your knowledge of the overall area and want to go deeper into the implications at an academic, philosophical or policy level this remains relevant and useful. Do not turn to it, however, for a current snapshot of the industry.

At $US4.82 and $US9.54 for the ebook and paperback respectively, O’Reilly appears to be currently discounting this in preparation for a new edition. When that happens I have no hesitation recommending this as the authoritative text providing a complete overview on a range of levels.

Author: Alan T. Norman

ISBN: no ISBN

Publisher: self-published, Alan T. Norman

Published in December 2017, Alan T. Norman’s latest book on the technology goes a lot deeper than many of these introductory texts. At 126 pages it simply has more depth and because Norman has written separate books on investing in digital currency and other areas of software development he has a deeper body of work on which to draw.

As one example of that depth, he actually goes into detail on the specific problems faced by organising financial services online, which BitCoin solves and the technical aspects of that solution. Put simply, the double spend problem is ensuring that money is only spent once and the solution is to combine the power of file sharing technology to ensure that information is widely distributed and always available with encryption to ensure that the distributed information is secure and accurate.

He builds that picture piece by piece using simple business english, with enough examples that most readers will get the picture, without being buried in technical detail.

He moves through the blockchain, BitCoin, other digital currencies and their uses and applications, distributed apps and the application of all this technology in corporations, software development and governance.

He breaks down the hype around the blockchain and distributed apps to paint a realistic picture of its implementation and how it will roll out in our everyday life.

Norman also goes into sufficient detail about the operation of the technology to explain why it is secure and how it works. These explanations are readable and straightforward without being dumbed down and over-simplistic.

For example his explanation about the use of cryptography in the blockchain is titled A Deep Dive on How Blockchain Hashing Works

He opens the chapter with the observation,

“This chapter is here by popular demand from reader comments. It’s a deep dive into how hashing works. This is going to get very technical, and you don’t have to read this section in order to understand the basics of blockchain.”

He then launches into a good, high level explanation of the idea of hashing (creating a code that proves online data has not been tampered with) and then, in the next section, how it is used in the blockchain. Once he has explained it as simply as possible he observes,

“I’ve been defining mining difficulty by the number of leading zeroes a successful hash needs to have, since it’s an easy visual way to understand mining difficulty. The truth is more complicated and variable.”

In this way, he builds up a complex understanding at the depth required by the reader. As soon as you get bored with the level of detail provided you jump to the next heading. By the end of that particular chapter, he has explained the SHA-256 hashing algorithm in sufficient detail that you could actually map it out and write the code required to perform it. Most readers will skip over some part of it, but it is great to be able to delve into it at your level of interest.

His discussion of the limitations of BitCoin as an active currency is honest and important. With gateway providers, such as Stripe, dropping support for BitCoin it is imperative that people considering the business applications of these technologies understand the thinking behind it. In a nutshell, that limitation is the time it takes to authorise a transaction on the blockchain. At many minutes that authorisation time is well outside the instant payment systems that we have become used to online rendering Bitcoin on its own useless as a medium for transaction in most ecommerce applications.

Norman outlines some of the approaches that are being taken to develop solutions to these teething problems but points out that the technology is not ready to sweep the world in quite the way that some of the marketing hype (and some of the less considered books available) suggest.

In summary, this is a nice combination of a low priced, self-published book and a reasonable depth of information. At the time of writing it was $US1.02 for the Kindle edition and $US9.95 for the paperback. That being said, the book is not as well produced as those from more established publishers. The ability to navigate through the book is limited to the basic functions of the Kindle application on which you are reading it. The layout is basic, there are no footnotes or references in the text and the presentation of headings and lists is primitive.

These are small sacrifices for the price saving if that matters to you.

Author: Artemis Caro

ISBN: 1985574020

Publisher: self-published, Artemis Caro

The full title of Artemis Caro’s recent book (February 2018) is Blockchain: The Beginners Guide To Understanding The Technology Behind Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency (The Future of Money). It is a quick overview and introduction aimed to provide introduce the interested reader to the overall concepts. It is cheap, $US3.10 on the Kindle and $US5.49 for the paperback and Kindle combined at the time of going to press. It is short and does not have a lot of depth. That said, it covers the basic questions in an organised fashion and gives you some pointers into what areas you might want to explore further. It sets out to cover the questions:

• A Brief History of Blockchain Technology
• Blockchain Basics: Managing Digital Transactions
• What is a Distributed Ledger?
• Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin
• Implications Of Blockchain: Big Data, Privacy & Personal Data
• Profiting from Blockchain Technologies
• Limitations & Challenges of Blockchain
• The Future of Blockchain

The marketing blurb says “The goal of this book is not to plumb the depths of the mathematical wizardry used to code blockchain-based applications, but rather to serve as an introduction to the broader architecture and conceptual background behind blockchain technology.” That is something of an understatement.

If you want a quick read to bring you up to speed this is not a bad way to get an overview fast. If you like doing your own research, though, a weekend on the Internet would probably give you more satisfaction.

Author: Brian Reel

ISBN: 1983889105

Publisher: self-published, Brian Reel

BLOCKCHAIN: Starting Guide For Beginners, All About Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, Mining And Future Of Money was self published by Brian Reel in January 2018 and provides a high level overview in straightforward business English.

Reel takes us through the actual processes of creating, using and trading in BitCoin as well as different ways of using the blockchain on which BitCoin is built. Each topic is dealt with in a practical way. The chapter on mining bitcoins, for example, discusses the method by which the block chain is stored and promulgated and how that is applied in the creation of new BitCoins (mining) and how companies are engaging in that mining exercise.

The information is general, providing information for the educated layperson, rather than providing technical information or specific methods for engaging in these activities. Like many of the introductory texts, especially those self published, the book is short and snappy, skipping across the surface of these complex topics.

For those who want to get an overview of the landscape quickly, this is probably ideal. Those who prefer to take more control of their research, though, a weekend on your favourite search engine may produce more useful (and current) results.

You can buy the ebook for $US0.99 by clicking here.