Stacks Discord channel: https://discord.com/channels/621759717756370964/1103835134068805702/1103835136061091920
Summary:
Igor, Marvin, and Trevor discuss publishing a Clarity book with a foreword by Peter Seibel to attract Lisp developers. They consider working with O'Reilly or Addison Wesley for publication. They also discuss potential practice problems and projects for the book, such as creating a DAO, building a DEX, integrating BNS, and highlighting Clarity's security advantages. Marvin suggests launching a custom token with a DAO as a fun learning experience. Igor proposes moving the discussion to a public GitHub artifact.
@MarvinJanssen
Marvin Janssen, [May 3, 2023 at 2:42:28 PM]
Awesome idea
As metioned before you guys joined the group, the book was made with the intent to perhaps publish it one day. It should easily allow for it
What we would need it is a bunch more practice projects and perhaps a separate website for the book where we publish all interactive examples and people can hack away on it
We already have a few different online IDEs so should be easy and quick enough
I like the tie-in with LISP. Do we know if any other popular chains use a LISP-like language for their smart contracts?
The kind of flow I had in mind when I wrote the book was the one from “Node.js the Right Way”. I read it ages ago when starting out with Node and what I loved about it is that it:
- Covered the basics
- Covered the latest developments
- Covered everything you needed to know about the toolchain to start working (node runtime, npm)
- And especially: introduced a lot of practical practice projects that you can build completely by just following the book.
When the Clarity book was put together, it was just one of many projects so I didn’t have a ton of time at the Foundation to write up some really nice practice projects back to back. I think adding such projects would bring it to the next level
(Also a common complaint to the book, for example the tiny market place project only covers the Clarity side, not any frontend so some people starting out didn’t really know where to go from there.)
@kenrogers
Some thoughts on projects that could make this the #1 resource for learning Clarity and take it over the finish line:
- +1 to adding a frontend, at least for one or two projects
- Creating an NFT collection
- Creating a DAO with ExecutorDAO
- Build a DEX
- Integrate BNS into a Clarity contract
- Some sort of Bitcoin-first app where we are using Friedger's Clarity<>Bitcoin library to read and verify transactions
- Security section - Clarity's security advantages over Solidity are not discussed enough, should add a whole section on security properties and advantages along with some "hack this contract" style projects and exercises with things like as-contract vulnerabilities
Happy to help with these where I can. Currently working on a large Bitcoin→Stacks course that teaches both Bitcoin programming fundamentals and then adds Stacks in, will focus heavily on sBTC when Mini comes out. It's designed to be a go-to all-in-one introductory resource for learning Bitcoin development.
Expanded Clarity book would be an excellent next step for mastering Clarity after learning the fundamentals of Bitcoin and Stacks. Should also source project ideas from other experienced Clarity devs like setzeus.