This book is narrowly focused on helping you learn to develop smart contracts on Ethereum. This focus requires that we cover a subset of the Ethereum protocol, the Solidity programming language, and the Ethereum Virtual Machine. For a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of Ethereum, we recommend Mastering Ethereum by Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Gavin Wood. That said, in order to develop smart contracts effectively, it’s critical that you understand certain fundamental smart contract concepts. We will cover those concepts in barely sufficient detail so that we don’t waste any time getting you into builder mode. We want you deploying your first smart contracts as soon as possible. We know this approach is the most reliable way for people to learn new technologies.