Vijay K. Madisetti and Arshdeep Bahga have released a new textbook, Blockchain Applications: A Hands-On Approach.

The services and manufacturing sectors provide employment to millions of professionals. These sectors are highly automated, and driven by sophisticated business processes forming an integral part of the digital economy. While the applications themselves may be distributed over the Internet in time and space, the core business, regulatory, and financial aspects of the digital economy are still centralized, with the need for centralized agencies (such as banks, customs authorities, and tax agencies) to authenticate and settle payments and transactions.

These centralized services often are manual, difficult to automate, and represent a bottleneck to facilitating a frictionless digital economy. The next revolutionary step in the services and manufacturing economy of the future is the development of automated distributed applications that do not depend on these traditional centralized agencies for controlling, facilitating and settling multi-party transactions that may themselves be subject to complex contractual constraints. The blockchain technology is an integral part of these next steps that promises a smart new world of automation of complex services and manufacturing processes.

Blockchain is a distributed and public ledger that maintains records of all the transactions on a blockchain network comprising suppliers of products and services and consumers. With the blockchain's ability to establish trust in a peer-to-peer network through a distributed consensus mechanism rather than relying on a powerful centralized authority, the technology is seen by the industry experts as one of the greatest innovations since the invention of the Internet. 

The book, Blockchain Applications, attempts to provide a solid foundation in the areas of financial and regulation technologies, business analytics, Internet of Things, and cryptocurrency in a manner that can be taught in colleges and universities to students who have completed at least one course in programming languages. The book is also written for use within industries in the FinTech and RegTech space that may be interested in rolling out products and services that utilize this new area of technology. Through extensive use of examples and case studies, with full code support, the book allows students to learn through doing.

The book proposes a blockchain stack comprising a decentralized computation platform, a decentralized messaging platform, and a decentralized storage platform. A specific realization of the blockchain stack based on the Ethereum blockchain platform is described. A design methodology for decentralized applications (Dapps) and associated patterns for smart contracts are described. Then detailed examples of smart contracts and Dapps and tested case studies describe implementation of blockchain applications using these tools and frameworks (including Ethereum, Solidity, Whisper, Swarm, Geth, PyEthApp, TestRPC, Mist Ethereum Wallet, MetaMask, Web3 JavaScript API, and Truffle). 

Madisetti is a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and Bahga previously worked as a research scientist with Georgia Tech ECE and is now the head of Cloudemy Technology Labs in the Chandigarh, India.

To learn more about the book, visit https://www.amazon.com/dp/0996025553/ or http://www.hands-on-books-series.com/.