Chapter 1, Blockchain - Enterprise and Industry Perspective, you've heard about blockchain and you are wondering, what is all the fuss about? In this chapter, we explore why blockchain is a game changer, what innovation it brings, and what the technology landscape is.
Chapter 2, Exploring Hyperledger Fabric, starts with an understanding of the blockchain landscape, then we turn our attention to Hyperledger Fabric. The aim of this chapter is to walk you through the deployment of each component of Hyperledger Fabric while unveiling/building the architecture.
Chapter 3, Setting the Stage with a Business Scenario, describes a business use case and then focuses on understanding the process of creating a good business network, using blockchain from requirements to design.
Chapter 4, Designing a Data and Transaction Model with Golang, aims to define what makes up a smart contract in Hyperledger Fabric. It will also introduce you to some terms regarding smart contracts and get you to experience the development of a chaincode using the Go language.
Chapter 5, Exposing Network Assets and Transactions, leveraging the smart contract written in the previous chapter, this chapter looks at the required integration of application to the network. It takes the readers through the process of configuring a channel, and installing and invoking chaincode, from a client application and considers the various integration patterns that might be used.
Chapter 6, Business Networks, has an objective to introduce and uncover the skills and tools needed to model a business network. Working at a higher level of abstraction, the foundation, tools, and framework will provide the reader with a way to quickly model, design, and deploy a complete end-to-end business network.
Chapter 7, A Business Network Example, putting the concepts of the previous chapter into practice, this chapter walks through the steps to deploy a full business network from end-user application to smart contracts.
Chapter 8, Agility in a Blockchain Network, focuses on the aspects required to maintain agility in a blockchain network. Applying DevOps concepts, the reader is presented with a continuous integration / continuous delivery pipeline.
Chapter 9, Life in a Blockchain Network, aims to raise the reader's awareness on the key activities and challenges that organizations and consortium may face when adopting a distributed ledger solution, ranging from management of application changes to maintenance of adequate performance levels. A successful network deployment will hopefully see that many organizations join it and that the number of transactions increase.
Chapter 10, Governance –The Necessary Evil of Regulated Industries, governance is a necessary evil for regulated industries, but governance is not required only for business network that deal with use cases for regulated industries. It is also a good practice to ensure longevity and scalability of a business network. This chapter explores vital considerations for production readiness for any founder-led blockchain network.
Chapter 11, Hyperledger Fabric Security, lays the foundation for security design of blockchain networks. Various security constructs are discussed and Hyperledger Fabric security is explained in detail. An essential chapter to understand security design considerations.
Chapter 12, Introduction to Blockchain Technology, gives an overview of the key concepts, such as cryptography and hash algorithms, the distributed ledger, transactions, blocks, proof of work, mining, and consensus. We cover Bitcoin, the mother of blockchain technology, in detail. We briefly introduce Ethereum by pointing out some limitations of Bitcoin and how they are addressed by Ethereum. While Bitcoin and Ethereum are examples of public blockchains, IBM's Hyperledger is used as an example of enterprise blockchains. Toward the end of this chapter, we look at the evolution of blockchain, through 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and beyond, and we examine their use cases.
Chapter 13, Ethereum Fundamentals, covers the basic concepts of Ethereum, such as smart contracts, ether, consensus algorithms, EVM, gas, and accounts. We will discuss Ethereum performance and review ideas on how to improve the overall performance via proof of work, casper, plasma, and sharding.
Chapter 14, Overview of Solidity Programming, discusses what solidity is, as well as the tools for the solidity development environment. We then discuss smart contracts and their common patterns. We cover the important topic of smart contract security. Finally, we show how to write a smart contract with a use case of crowdfunding.
Chapter 15, Building an Ethereum Blockchain Application, looks at what a DApp is. We give a quick overview of web3.js. We explain how to set up an Ethereum development environment, as well as how to develop and test a DApp.
Chapter 16, Exploring an Enterprise Blockchain Application Using Hyperledger Fabric, gets into the key concepts of Hyperledger Fabric, along with the core components. We explain how to create a Hyperledger Fabric environment, how to write a chaincode, and how to set up Hyperledger Fabric configuration.
Chapter 17, Implementing a Business Network Using Hyperledger Composer, provides an overview of Hyperledger Composer and talks about how to set up a Hyperledger Composer environment. We discuss business scenarios, the business network archive, and how to implement a business transaction function.
Chapter 18, Blockchain Use Cases, first talks about popular blockchain use cases across industries, including the financial sector, civil services, supply chains, the Internet of Things (IoT), and healthcare, at a high level. We will then proceed to a discussion of the proper use cases for DApps, before then developing a successful DApp. Finally, we take the health data-sharing use case and comment at a high level on building a DApp for it.