Ethereum Clients

So far, we've primarily focused on how to write Solidity code, but now we'll take a deeper look into how Ethereum works. In this chapter, we'll first learn how to interact with an Ethereum network programmatically, how to write code that can deploy contracts, call methods on them, get information about the network, and more. This will allow us to write applications that are built on top of the Ethereum network, which is an important skill to have for anyone who wants to become a proficient Ethereum developer.

We'll then put theory into practice and write two scripts in JavaScript: one to programmatically deploy the NameService smart contract we created in the previous chapter and the other to send transactions and call methods on the deployed smart contract. We'll also cover some other topics we'll need along the way, for example, how to use the Solidity compiler.

Nodes and clients

Before we look into how to interact with an Ethereum network, we need to learn more about how it's organized and some of its terminology that we'll use throughout the course.

To interact with an Ethereum network, e.g., to send a transaction or deploy a smart ...