Ethereum For Dummies, By Michael G. Solomon, May 2019, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of Ethereum For Dummies By Michael G. Solomon, May 2019

As an emerging application of blockchain technology, Ethereum attracts a wide range of professionals – from financial pros who see it as a way to enhance their business, security analysts who want to conduct secure transactions, programmers who build apps that employ the Ethereum blockchain, or investors interested in cashing in on the rise of cryptocurrency.

It takes a knowledgeable guiding hand to understand how Ethereum works and what it does — and Ethereum For Dummies provides that guidance. Written by Michael G. Solomon, one of the leading voices in the blockchain community, this book demystifies the workings of Ethereum and shows how it can enhance security, transactions, and investments.

Ethereum For Dummies, By Michael G. Solomon, May 2019, reviewed

After the initial book on Blockchain for Dummies (and it’srevised 2nd edition) this is a logical spin out book, to specifically focus on one of the key platforms within the emerging blockchain space. At the big picture level it seems like we still may be witnessing some format wars that have yet to completely play out, between Ethereum, EOS and other rivals. So we were interested to read this book to get a deeper understanding of this author’s perspective in terms of these questions.

Solomon does not directly address this specific question (if the book reaches a second edition then that will perhaps be the answer to this challenge), the implication behind dedicating a book solely to Ethereum is that they believe it is a technology that was a variety of uses, use cases, and is valuable enough to remain in use. Solomon does a good job of explaining why Ethereum and ether, it’s own cryptocurrency are, how they work, and where they are positioned in relation to the wider blockchain and crypto ecosphere.

The latter sections of the book dive deeply into the code, from setting up an ethereum developer environment, to building distributed blockchain apps and testing and deploying ethereum apps. Solomon does a good job of explaining why and when you might chose to use some of these technologies to achieve various different potential solutions. The ethereum version of twitter sounded interesting but the necessity of having to pay for your tweets, even at a small level of cost, may well dissuade many people from chosing to use this option. A good illustration of the value of ‘free’ over paid, even if it means that you then get ads and the other things that large multinationals like to do with your data.

This  book does what it says on the cover and is a solid entry point into the world of ethereum. Later editions will prove to be interesting as we will see if ethereum manages to hold it’s own and find it’s place in a rapidly evolving blockchain world.

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