Preface

Rust is one of the most widely used languages in blockchain systems and many popular blockchains including Solana, Polkadot, Aptos, and Sui are built with Rust. Rust frameworks such as Foundry are also highly preferred by developers of established chains including Ethereum.

Learning how decentralized apps work on popular Rust chains and also how to build your own blockchains – whether from scratch or using frameworks such as Substrate – is an important skill to have since all big dApps, at some point, end up moving to their own chains, also referred to as application chains.

This book is for developers who want to go deep and understand how Rust is used for building dApps and blockchains and add a new dimension to their Rust skills.

Who this book is for

This book is for blockchain and dApp developers, blockchain enthusiasts, and Rust engineers who want to step up their game by adding blockchain to their repertoire of skills.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Blockchains with Rust, outlines the critical blockchain concepts that we will use in the book.

Chapter 2, Rust – Necessary Concepts for Building Blockchains, explores the critical Rust concepts that we will be using to build our own blockchain.

Chapter 3, Building a Custom Blockchain, lays the foundation and the building blocks for our own custom blockchain that we’re building from scratch.

Chapter 4, Adding More Features to Our Custom Blockchain, sees up build on our blockchain and add more features to it.

Chapter 5, Finishing Up Our Custom Blockchain, brings together all the individual blocks that we have built and combines them into a complete blockchain.

Chapter 6, Using Foundry to Build on Ethereum, explores Foundry, a Rust framework that can be used to build and deploy smart contracts on Ethereum.

Chapter 7, Exploring Solana by Building a dApp, teaches you how to build a dApp for Solana.

Chapter 8, Exploring NEAR by Building a dApp, teaches you how to build a dApp for an upcoming blockchain, NEAR.

Chapter 9, Exploring Polkadot, Kusama, and Substrate, explores the basic concepts behind Substrate, which enables developers to build their own chains.

Chapter 10, Hands-On with Substrate, uses our knowledge of Substrate to build a custom blockchain.

Chapter 11, Future of Rust for Blockchains, discusses the future of blockchains with Rust.

To get the most out of this book

We’re assuming that you know your way around Rust and have knowledge of all its basic concepts.

Software/hardware covered in the book	Operating system requirements
Rust 1.74.0 or higher	Windows, macOS, or Linux
Cargo	Windows, macOS, or Linux

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Rust-for-Blockchain-Application-Development. If there’s an update to the code, it will be updated in the GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: “rustup is the toolchain manager that includes the compiler and Cargo’s package manager.”

A block of code is set as follows:

pub struct Block {
    timestamp: i64,
    pre_block_hash: String,
    hash: String,
    transactions: Vec<Transaction>,
    nonce: i64,
    height: usize,
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

brew install rustup

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: “Working with strings is straightforward in Rust, so it’s important to know the difference between the String type and string literals.”

Tips or important notes

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Get in touch

Feedback from our readers is always welcome.

General feedback: If you have questions about any aspect of this book, email us at [e-mail] and mention the book title in the subject of your message.

Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book, we would be grateful if you would report this to us. Please visit www.packtpub.com/support/errata and fill in the form.

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