From Noob to Proficient, How You Can Program on Blockchains in 40 days

Hi all,

I recently wanted to get proficient in developing for blockchains, more specifically for BTC. After hours of research, I realized the most efficient way to learn is to attend a workshop and get as much hands-on training as possible first. I discovered Jimmy Song and his courses. Located in Shenzhen, China, I decided to attend his next seminar in Hong Kong (less than an hour away). The problem is that his course is somewhat advanced and requires an intermediate understanding of programming language and blockchain in general. So, I have made a study plan for getting proficient enough to take his course in the next 40 days and would like to share my plan/resources with everyone. TLDR on the plan? It takes an hour a day for the next 40 days, it includes both reading and working (writing code for a purpose) and IT'S FREE.

Disclaimer I am no way affiliated with Jimmy. I just made this study plan for myself and think others will benefit in following it as well to get started with programming on the blockchain. There are a ton of other bootcamps out there, I chose Jimmy's because it just fits my schedule and location.

First, a short introduction on Jimmy and his course. Details can be found here: http://programmingblockchain.com

Instructor BIO: "Jimmy Song is a Bitcoin Core Contributor and former VP of Engineering for Armory. He caught the Bitcoin bug back in 2011 and started contributing to Bitcoin open source projects since 2013. He’s a contributor to CoinDesk and has a popular Bitcoin blog. He’s been teaching blockchain to engineers for over 3 years. Jimmy graduated from the University of Michigan with a Bachelors of Science in Mathematics."

Course Description: Learn the ins and outs of blockchain development in this interactive 2-day seminar. You will learn the details of how Bitcoin works including live coding challenges to sharpen your skills. You will learn:

Finite Fields
Elliptic Curves
Elliptic Curve Cryptography
Signing/Verifying Messages
Parsing Transactions
Signing Transactions
Creating Transactions
Script parsing and processing
Address construction/Private Key WIF Format Construction
Parsing Blocks
Validating Proof-of-Work
Difficulty Calculations
Merkle Tree Construction
Merkle Proofs
Network Message Parsing
Segwit
Finding a job in Bitcoin Development

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Here are the resources you will need to follow this study plan:

1. https://www.sololearn.com/Play/Python. Register and unlock all the sections by looking at the answers. You will skip many aspects of Python as they are not as relevant in coding on blockchain.
2. https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook I will be using the page numbers in the PDF version. I highly encourage you to buy this book as it supports Andreas and is a lot convenient to read.

Day 1 - lesson 1-5, book pages 67-85
2-lesson 5-7, book pages 86-125
3-lesson 7-13, book pages 126-202
4-lesson 27-29, book pages 203-215
5-lesson 30-31, book pages 215-244
6-lesson 32-35, book pages 244-297
7-lesson 36, book pages 297-361
8-lesson 37-40, book pages 362-419
9-lesson 41-44, book pages 420-444
10-lesson 45, book pages 445-501
11-lesson 56-57, book pages 502-538
12-lesson 58-59, book pages 539-586
13-lesson 60-63, book pages 586-606
14-lesson 64-65, book pages 607-734
15-lesson review, book pages 735-774

I've only got the first 2 weeks planned and will update this post around that time to reflect my progress. I hope you will join me and let's keep each other motivated!

-Dan