Want to Learn Solidity? There is a dApp for that

With so much emphasis being placed on the need for solidity developers for Ethereum smart contracts, you may be wondering how you can easily and effectively learn the Solidity language.

Thankfully, there is a really helpful and fun way to learn the language. That is through the use of an interesting platform called CryptoZombies.

Released by the Loom Network, CryptoZombies helps users to learn the language through a quirky Ethereum powered zombie game.

What is it?

In a similar fashion to a number of other guided learning experiences such as codecademey, Cryptozombies takes users through the whole language from the basics through to more advanced topics.

In the first lesson on the game, the user is taken through the setup of a basic contract such as the configuration, variables, data structure, arrays and events.

Although the game is a guided coding experience, it is not for complete beginners to programming. Some understanding of another programming language is at least required in order to complete it without too much head scratching.

Although the site does not promise that you will be able to code high value and complicated smart contracts, the game is no doubt a great way for you to break into solidity programming.

Teething Problems

While the site is well laid out and the lessons are semi intuitive, there are some areas that can be improved. Some of the explanations on the site require more descriptions and there are some confusing statements.

An example of this is their description of how the operators will work. They go over how operators will work in Solidity such as addition, multiplication and subtraction. When it comes to exponents, they say that you can use operators such as 10^16.

When the user enters the exponent of 10^16 however, they are greeted by an error. The user may be stuck and short of any explanation of why this has occurred. However, if the user was to navigate to an obscure box at the bottom page, they would see that exponentiation works much like Python.

In other words, if you wanted to square a number, you would ** in the place of ^. Hence, there was no need to really introduce the ^ symbol in the first place.

There are a few other similar examples throughout the game. While they are not insurmountable, they place the onus on those who are being guided to do external research to progress.

Potential Updates

While there may be one or two explanation problems with CryptoZombies, it is important to remember that it is only just released. Most software has to go through these teething problems in order to refine the product.

Currently, there is only one game that is available on the platform. There are a number of updates which could be implemented on the game over the next few months.

Zoom, who develops the game has said that new lessons will be added to the game every 1 or 2 weeks. The goal of the team is to complete the project to a level where a user can create an entire zombie game from the beginning stages to completion.

Until then, you can complete your first level on CryptoZombies and take the first step to becoming an in-demand Solidity programmer.