Hi,
I’m hoping to get involved with the Cardano project and contribute to development. I’ve been looking through the github issues but the project is large and i’m finding it quite difficult to find where to start.
Are there any ideas about beginner projects or ideas to get involved, revolving around Haskell/Plutus?
Thanks
Hello @watson,
great question! If you are interested in learning Plutus, the smart contract language of Cardano, you can get the Plutus book on Leanpub for a price you set yourself, even free. https://leanpub.com/plutus-smart-contracts
This is not meant to be for people to start from scratch in terms of programming, but the first few chapters could be still very interesting because of the blockchain and smart contract explanations.
Just have a look and give us some feedback here in the thread. This would be very interesting.
If it gets “too much” for you, take a step back and follow the Marlowe course on udemy: https://www.udemy.com/marlowe-programming-language/ (this one is a bit old)
Note: There is now a series of new videos on Marlowe by Simpson Thompson:
There is also one free udemy course for Plutus:
Also, a great resource to start for people that did programming in the past is the Haskell book:
http://learnyouahaskell.com/introduction#about-this-tutorial
@ADARudi, @adatainment thanks for these, i’ll get through them in the next few days and let you know how it goes.
https://leanpub.com/plutus-smart-contracts says that the book is out of date and shows Plutus as it was in 2019. Do you have a short list of things that have changed for the next edition of Plutus so I can keep that in mind while learning it, e.g. is it just basic syntax changes, is it completely rewritten, are there any features that are now deprecated?
Is the lesson on https://edu.clio.one/plutus-lessons/ up to date with Plutus or is that also the 2019 version?
Hey @adatainment, finished it and some feedback as requested.
I started this with knowledge of Haskell but no experience with blockchain. I started with the Plutus book but in hindsight i think i should have started with the Clio lesson (only the first lesson is available at the time of writing) as it was a simple overview and introduction, whereas the Plutus book was much more in depth.
As it was my first time working with blockchain i felt chapter 3 could be explained better with an accompanying example to illustrate the datatypes for the UTXO defintions. Also Chapter 6 was initially quite hard to understand, i wasn’t able to grasp the purpose of the Validator, Redeemer and Data scripts even though it explained them in great detail. It suddenly made sense however in the first few paragraphs of Chapter 8 with the example.
I would say for someone with no experience in blockchain then the first 6 chapters might be hard to understand at times, but after finishing the second half from chapter 7 to the end the first half now makes more sense. Overall a great overview and introduction to writing Smart Contracts
I assume it won’t be possible until Goguen is released but it would also be interesting to show how to set up a local testing instance of the blockchain and how to write apps that would integrate with it.
Thanks
Hi watson. Just look at current version of Guessing Game, and compare it to the book’s version, or even this one - you’ll see, they changed a lot(Types, functions, even some layers…), so I suggest to keep eye on repo, and try to decipher current one. It is possible IMHO for simple ones like a Game… But lack of documentation is really ridiculous for such respectfull project…