bitcoin programming book

is there any reference or authoritative resource, or book on bitcoin programming?

Bitcoin is dubbed "programmable money" but there is no obvious resource for how to do it aside from trudging through subsections of hack-prone forum.

Altcoins many times are simply find and replacing the word "bitcoin" in the code base and clients, so it seems even in that case their programmers have a thin understanding of various bitcoin programming paradigms.

I'm sure a "book" would be outdated by the time it was published, but regardless it would be helpful to have everything in one place for a potential target audience that doesn't want to reverse engineer commit history just to see whats going on.

development

CQM

Posted 2013-12-10T17:40:33.353

Reputation: 1 472

I was thinking the same yesterday: it is missing. Its also a broad topic ... – Roland Kofler – 2013-12-10T19:24:16.720

@Roo yes it is a broad topic, there seem to be some people able to make theoretical tweaks to the protocol (Zerocoin, Mastercoin) and still some features of the protocol still not implemented anywhere. If the source material was more easily accessible, especially by more academically minded folks, then more could happen – CQM – 2013-12-10T20:32:11.133

I started to write a bitcoin transaction programming tutorial: http://goo.gl/s0kKbe

– Roland Kofler – 2013-12-24T00:08:54.500

you can read Mastering Bitcoin for free on-line here http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000001802/index.html

– Xawery Wiśniowiecki – 2014-12-15T21:18:20.677

Answers

It is in the works. Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

http://bitcoinbook.info/

RentFree

Posted 2013-12-10T17:40:33.353

Reputation: 2 391

How can I read it right now? On the website I cannot buy nor ebook neither paper version yet. I found https://github.com/aantonop/bitcoinbook but I cannot compile the asciidoc properly. Please help me with this question if you can: http://ebooks.stackexchange.com/questions/2535/how-to-render-asciidoc-with-latexmath-macros

– Aleksei Petrenko – 2014-10-26T12:29:20.807

Here you have http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000001802/index.html Whole book online

– Xawery Wiśniowiecki – 2014-12-16T09:08:39.300

I'm writing a blog series for beginners called "Basic Blockchain Programming" that might suit your needs. It starts from scratch until building the first raw transaction:

http://davidederosa.com/basic-blockchain-programming/

It's still a work in progress, though (4 or 5 posts left).

keeshux

Posted 2013-12-10T17:40:33.353

Reputation: 366

As far as I know a book about bitcoin programming doesn't exists.

The best resource you will find is the bitcoin wiki that is describing the bitcoin protocols very well.

July 2014 Edit

Now there is a book called Mastering Bitcoin that is available in early release.

I believe that this book match to what you are looking.

You can buy here on Here

Jan Moritz

Posted 2013-12-10T17:40:33.353

Reputation: 771

This answer has already been given. – jorijnsmit – 2014-07-26T14:34:16.243

Bitcoin Programming Book

Bitcoin Programming Book by Mostafa Farghaly

PDF https://gumroad.com/l/Bitcoin-Programming-book

Paperback http://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Programming-Mostafa-Farghaly/dp/1500176826/

Farghaly

Posted 2013-12-10T17:40:33.353

Reputation: 849

they don't accept btc? alright thanks! – CQM – 2014-06-12T22:45:11.073

The best sources that I found for free:

I didn't check this out Bitcoin Programming by Mostafa Farghaly but looks like a good wisdom source.

Xawery Wiśniowiecki

Posted 2013-12-10T17:40:33.353

Reputation: 709

I would post this as a comment to another answer, but I don't have enough reputation.

I haven't read Basic Blockchain Programming, but have read at least parts of all the other books mentioned here. The one I found most useful was Bitcoin Programming by Mostafa Farghaly. Be warned that the English is poor (but totally understandable), and there are some typos in the code. That being said, it will point you in the right direction. It has some basic code examples in JavaScript, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Most of the examples are in Python. If you're new to programming, I would recommend checking out Think Python first.

JNCF

Posted 2013-12-10T17:40:33.353

Reputation: 89

Programming Bitcoin by Jimmy Song

ISBN: 9781492031482

Matthew Steven Monkan

Posted 2013-12-10T17:40:33.353

Reputation: 123

well yes there are several good sources 6 years later :) – CQM – 2019-04-18T07:11:49.593

I find this wonderful software a very interesting style of programming bitcoin and you can consider it as a book with this title "Asynchronous C++ Bitcoin programming". The name of the software is

libbitcoin - Asynchronous C++ Bitcoin library

Mainly it used the famous boost library ASIO. It provides developers with an asynchronous I/O model using a modern C++ approach.

The libbitcoin library took advantage of the algorithmic aspect of recent C++ 11/14 (lambdas heavily used in the coding, also an understanding of the new introduced pointers, variadic functions, bind function, promise & future is a must).

efaysal

Posted 2013-12-10T17:40:33.353

Reputation: 41