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Programming Bitcoin: Learn How to Program Bitcoin from Scratch 1st Edition

by Jimmy Song (Author)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 178 ratings
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Dive into Bitcoin technology with this hands-on guide from one of the leading teachers on Bitcoin and Bitcoin programming. Author Jimmy Song shows Python programmers and developers how to program a Bitcoin library from scratch. You’ll learn how to work with the basics, including the math, blocks, network, and transactions behind this popular cryptocurrency and its blockchain payment system.

By the end of the book, you'll understand how this cryptocurrency works under the hood by coding all the components necessary for a Bitcoin library. Learn how to create transactions, get the data you need from peers, and send transactions over the network. Whether you’re exploring Bitcoin applications for your company or considering a new career path, this practical book will get you started.

  • Parse, validate, and create bitcoin transactions
  • Learn Script, the smart contract language behind Bitcoin
  • Do exercises in each chapter to build a Bitcoin library from scratch
  • Understand how proof-of-work secures the blockchain
  • Program Bitcoin using Python 3
  • Understand how simplified payment verification and light wallets work
  • Work with public-key cryptography and cryptographic primitives

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Previous page
  1. ISBN-10
    1492031496
  2. ISBN-13
    978-1492031499
  3. Edition
    1st
  4. Publisher
    O'Reilly Media
  5. Publication date
    March 26, 2019
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    7 x 0.75 x 9 inches
  8. Print length
    319 pages
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"The exercises in this book will not only teach you the mechanics of working with the blockchain but also [give you] an intuition for the elegance and beauty of this technology."
--Ken Liu
a winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards. His science fiction story about the blockchain, Byzantine Empathy, was originally published by MIT Press.

About the Author

Jimmy Song is a programmer with 20 years of experience, the last 4 being in Bitcoin. He’s the editor of bitcointechtalk.com and blogs at medium.com. He’s contributed to Bitcoin Core as well as other Bitcoin projects. He was the former VP of Engineering at Armory, a Bitcoin wallet

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (March 26, 2019)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 319 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1492031496
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1492031499
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 0.75 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 178 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Jimmy Song

Jimmy Song

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Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Jimmy Song is a Bitcoin Educator, Developer and Entrepreneur. Jimmy is the author of Programming Bitcoin and The Little Bitcoin Book. In addition, he’s a Bitcoin Fellow at Blockchain Capital, a lecturer at the University of Texas, a speaker at Bitcoin conferences, an avid open source contributor, mostly in Bitcoin, and the instructor of a 2-day workshop for programmers, Programming Blockchain.

Jimmy once bought about $100 worth of beef jerky with Bitcoin back in 2013 for 0.25 BTC. Good beef jerky, but not THAT good. That's one major regret. He also got scammed out of 2.5 BTC when he bought a Alitin Mint Adam Smith 2 BTC coin. Those guys had a copy of the private key and the bitcoins on the coin got stolen a few years ago. Another major regret.

Jimmy's goal is to bring sound money to the world. Bitcoin is the one chance at defunding and decentralizing the power of the oligarchy. Making more developers for the ecosystem is his passion.

PGP Fingerprint: C1D7 97BE 7D10 5291 228C D70C FAA6 17E3 2679 E455

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
178 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Pen Name
5.0 out of 5 stars See how the sausage is made
Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2022
Verified Purchase
Excellent, in-depth, technical overview of how bitcoin works under the hood. This book is a hands-on project book that will take you through building a proof-of-concept bitcoin library, step-by-step. The library you'll build can parse and validate transactions, verify blocks, interact with other nodes on the bitcoin network and more.

Like other reviews mentioned, this is an advance level book. It's not a book for folks new to bitcoin or folks without programming experience. I also agree that reading Mastering Bitcoin first will make this book a much better experience because you'll know where each of the modules you're building fits in the bigger picture.

The author has set up the hands-on project as Jupyter Notebooks which makes it really nice to code along the text. In addition, he goes into more details on the math behind elliptic curve cryptography which I appreciated. Overall, highly recommended for people that want to remove the veil and see how bitcoin works to the smallest detail.
6 people found this helpful
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Hieu Nguyen
5.0 out of 5 stars The most in-depth guide for Bitcoin programming
Reviewed in the United States on February 22, 2019
Verified Purchase
I took Jimmy's "Programming Blockchain" bootcamp and witnessed first hand how much Jimmy prepared for his teaching material. His material is amazingly in-depth and comprehensive. From finite fields math to elliptic curves to how wallets and transactions are created, to the different types of transaction formats and how to create them yourself, to more advanced topics like SegWit and Lightning. This book is the result of Jimmy's many hours of teaching. I can't recommend this book enough to anyone who seriously wants to get their hands on Bitcoin scripting or learn how Bitcoin works under the hood.

Be warned, it is not a light reading and it's best to work out all the exercises yourself (there are plenty, enough for you to be able to create your own Bitcoin wallet software at the end). IMO this book is the equivalent of one maybe two graduate level courses if it's taught in universities. Well worth the investment.
26 people found this helpful
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Pedro G.
5.0 out of 5 stars Learn a little python so you can learn a lot of Bitcoin
Reviewed in the United States on May 19, 2019
Verified Purchase
I was coming from a background in php and javascript and didn't know any python. Learned some rudimentary python just so I could go through the book. Just enough to understand the syntax and the inner workings of python.

Not good enough at programming to have taken full advantage of the book but it really helped me a lot in understanding the math behind Bitcoin. From the very basics of cryptography to understanding address generation, Script, transaction validation, block validation, and even some networking.

A must read for anyone interested in understanding Bitcoin at a more technical level, rather than just taking the word of developers. For me it was great first step towards financial Bitcoin sovereignty.
13 people found this helpful
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audiamondag
4.0 out of 5 stars My take on the cost
Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2019
Verified Purchase
While the book's cost was surprisingly high compared to the excellent volumes by Andreas and Safedean, the facts that (1) color is used extensively and very tastefully and (2) the paper quality is superior in this text justifies the additional cost for me.
12 people found this helpful
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klempk
5.0 out of 5 stars Worth every penny
Reviewed in the United States on March 17, 2019
Verified Purchase
An amazing book. If you really want to understand Bitcoin, read Mastering Bitcoin first, then work your way through this book. Although Jimmy recommends intermediate level Python programming skills, if you have any coding background, you should be able to zip through a quick Python primer (like SoloLearn's) and be pretty well prepped to dig in (this is what I did, and was fine).

Highest recommendation
15 people found this helpful
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Ruben Mulet
5.0 out of 5 stars Easy to understand
Reviewed in the United States on May 2, 2019
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Great book, easy to navigate for a beginner, I would definitely recommend this to someone getting into bitcoin as a good first book.
2 people found this helpful
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Stephen Davidson
3.0 out of 5 stars Extremely Detailed But A Long Read!
Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2023
Verified Purchase
This book covers everything that you need to know about creating Bitcoin from scratch. However, this book tends to be a long read and it's best for someone who is already a pretty decent computer programmer. It's not for the novice or someone who just got started.
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5.0 out of 5 stars The paperback version is worth buying! The math more straightforward than expected, stick with it!
Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2019
TL;DR Buy the paperback, it’s very helpful to have a physical book in front of you to reference as you’re looking at your computer screen trying to write code.

Jimmy introduces the reader to Bitcoin by way of its most foundational building blocks: math and cryptography (both surprisingly accessible, not much fancy math at all). Along with example Python code throughout the book, he also gives code exercises to reinforce your learning (as well as their answers, which are helpful when you’re stuck). The code is also pretty accessible for non-coders (it definitely helps to have some working knowledge of programming though). Also, the Python library is on his GitHub for quick reference purposes (trust me, you’ll want to use this).

I spent quite a bit of time digging into each chapter’s content, but for many topics you can choose to go as deep as you want (although some chapters are crucial to the ones that follow it, like the transactions chapter). I was quite impressed with how intuitive most of his analogies and explanations were, so they lend themselves to a lighter read if you want to explore a few select chapters without reading the book from cover to cover.

Now, the unexpected and massive benefits of having the physical paperback in from of you as you look at the code on your computer:

- At certain points you’ll probably have a few browser tabs open simultaneously for referencing the codebase on Jimmy’s GitHub. I did this often, and having the paperback in front of me was especially helpful for the topics that combined concepts from different chapters with code from different files. It’s much easier to keep track of everything if the book is in front of you.
- You can write notes directly in the book (I took notes on a Trello board, and you can do both for quick reference)
- Your eyes will thank you for not staring uninterrupted at the computer screen.

The content is dense and I struggled through a lot of it, but understanding the elegantly designed system of Bitcoin is now something I’ll always have a deep appreciation for.
4 people found this helpful
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Amazon_reviewer
5.0 out of 5 stars A reference book you will keep going back to
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 9, 2023
Verified Purchase
This is a very good detailed book. However, the topics are fairly complicated so it is not light reading. I would recommend this book as it is very in-depth. If you are looking for a more light hearted or simple book it may be best to start with Saifedean Ammous, The Bitcoin Standard, BBCDSatoshi, Buy Bitcoin You’ll Thank Yourself In The Future or Saifedean Ammous, The Bitcoin Standard. The author Jimmy Song is often seen on TV doing interviews which are well worth watching too. Overall, I recommend this book as it is very detailed and acts as a reference book to keep going back to.
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Alexandre Allegro
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book if you want to dive into the technical parts of bitcoin
Reviewed in Germany on February 1, 2023
Verified Purchase
Awesome book, great explanations. But not for the not-tech folks. It's very technical, be warned.
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Diego
5.0 out of 5 stars Justo lo que buscaba
Reviewed in Spain on February 26, 2021
Verified Purchase
Llevaba tiempo queriendo aprender bitcoin a un nivel más técnico, hay muchísimo contenido fundamental en internet pero enseñarlo a programar no hay casi nada de calidad. Este libro es justo lo que buscaba. Empieza de forma muy sencilla por los conceptos y usando un entorno muy amigable para los que no tengan mucha experiencia en el desarrollo de software. Usa python3 con Jupyter notebook, enseña a instalarlo y usarlo en win, linux y mac.
3 people found this helpful
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Francisco Javier Segura Saviñon
5.0 out of 5 stars Increible. No lo leas sin saber Python 3 o haber leido antes Grokking Bitcoin
Reviewed in Mexico on December 29, 2019
Verified Purchase
Al principio esta muy pesado y porque la criptografía de curva elíptica es muy pesada, sin embargo empieza a tomar sentido a partir del capítulo 3, donde une todas las piezas encontradas anteriormente. Los demas capitulos son geniales, en especial en donde haces una transacción en la testnet y tu mismo la lanzas a la red. 10/10.
3 people found this helpful
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Paulo
5.0 out of 5 stars The quality for delivery is great
Reviewed in Canada on April 19, 2019
Verified Purchase
Good so far. It is brand new and nice wrapped.
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