Introduction to Introduction to Smart Contracts with Ethereum and Solidity

Noah Hein: [0:00] Everyone, welcome to an introduction to Smart Contracts with Ethereum and Solidity. My name is Noah Hein, and I am going to be taking you through how you are going to write, test, and deploy your very first smart contract to the Ethereum platform. [0:15] Given that this course is going to take about 45 minutes, that means that we are really taking you from zero to hero. We will go over to the best of our abilities, at a high level, everything that you need to know, and you will actually have a working smart contract by the time that you end this tutorial.

[0:33] That also means that there is going to be several things that you are left unequipped to deal with. And so, without further ado, we'll go ahead and hop into what foundry is because foundry is the smart contract development toolchain that we are going to be using throughout this entire course.

[0:51] Every single lesson, you will be using foundry in one way or another. Foundry manages our dependencies. It compiles our project for us and will also allow us to deploy our smart contracts to both our local machine and a test network.

[1:07] It really streamlines the entire development of writing smart contracts because instead of previous to foundry, you would have to hop back and forth between a Solidity, which is the language that we use to actually write our smart contracts. That is what gets compiled down into bytecode and that is the code that is run on the Ethereum nodes that is executing the code that you've written.

[1:31] All of that happens in Solidity. Previously, you would need to bounce back and forth between, for example, JavaScript or Python and Solidity to test your smart contracts. Foundry is the first development toolchain that has embraced Solidity as a first-class language that can be used for something that is something different than only writing smart contracts.

[1:54] It will allow us to test our smart contracts, writing the same Solidity language that we're using to write the source code that we want to test. Without further ado, let's go ahead and hop into, "How do we install foundry?"