Bitcoin Forum

I've been playing around with coding on and off without any real purpose and motivation. But now I think I have found that purpose and that to learn more about Bitcoin and altcoins on a technical level. I want to be able to gauge and find out for myself if a particular project is technically sound as they were meant to be.

I've been learning C++. But I want to also do some practical learning. If I already have the basics of C++, where can I start practicing to understand Bitcoin better aside from learning more C++?

I've seen some "make your own altcoin" threads and I thought that might be a good learning experience, but what else?

Read the technical documentation and read the source code of Bitcoin Core.

A good start.

If you want to learn it properly, implement your own coin and network - from scratch.

Then you must have a lot of research on that, there's a lot of discussion here regarding your concerned you must read and learn, try to go on Development & Technical Discussion here's the link. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=6.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=6.0)

I am not a coder or a Techie but there is a token called STRATIS that is working on C+ etc and you can use their platform to code stuff and do smart contracts soon with your type of programming knowledge. They are also introducing a breeze wallet for private Bitcoin and Stratis transactions so you might want to check them out.

Why don't you read the code and try to understand and maybe try to write your own script? This is how I started, I don't want to read, I want practical practices so I decided to put a more hands on approach so that I can really understand and I made great stride learning it.

A good start for me to understand at least a little bit is this webpage: Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol (http://www.righto.com/2014/02/bitcoins-hard-way-using-raw-bitcoin.html). The author explains what really happens when you connect to the network and send transactions.

It is probably a bit outdated now as it's from 2014, but the basics are still the same. The author uses Python scripts, but they are really simple and should give you the basic knowledge you need to understand the technical documentation, and after that, the code.

For me, it's better to teach something on Python than C++. Python easier and better for understanding. Also, for newbie.
Electrum for example has been wrote on Python. 

This is a nice one in my opinion. Check it out:

http://davidederosa.com/basic-blockchain-programming/ (http://davidederosa.com/basic-blockchain-programming/)

try the bitcoin course from princeton on coursera. they have programming projects that will help you learn the technical parts but they are in java. can pick java up pretty quickly if you are decent at c++

The book "Mastering Bitcoin" has also some coding examples.

Forgetting bitcoin for a second, if you just want to polish up your C++ skills, a great free site to do this is hackerrank.com , extra cool because you can do all the various exercises in several different languages back and forth.

amazing site, another one like this is hcodecademy.com, but I think that hackerrank.com has more practical and interesting exercises. It is completely different if you just read code of bitcoin core or you actually code.

C++ is basic thing,then you have to learn different thing which are dependent on or using  it.leave blockchain  or btc wallet programming till you learn other things.first improve your knowledge regarding servers and node,you can learn socket programming.you can learn other library as well if you want to.then you can read wiki or pdf of bitcoin . creating blockchain/wallet from scratch require a good amount of time so use prebuilt wallet to start first time.

If you are good at C++. Now you can focus on C++ with OpenCL / Cuda for GPU programming. Also, you should definitely learn about the autonomy, decentralization, fault tolerance, and scalability of distributed hash tables. Bitcoin core programming is in C++ and there are many books available online for free which can teach you programming the blockchain in C++. Along with this you can focus on some other languages too as they are more widely accepted nowadays such as JAVA, Python, Perl.

@AK47: Can you name some, except "Mastering Bitcoin" by Antonopolous?

This is a best available book according to me. Others are not well accepted. So, I would say why don't you try some online courses and tutorials. This way you can practically learn things. There is byte academy, tutorials at 21.co, course at Udemy and many more. Why don't you search for them and choose the best suited to you. There is a book called programming the blockchain in C#. I haven't read that. Just heard about it. So, I don't know about the content. Else Mastering Bitcoin is best book available.

http://davidederosa.com/basic-blockchain-programming/

This might be a good start!

I found this article helpful (http://trilema.com/2015/basic-bitcoin-competency-certification/) when I was starting my journey into basic Bitcoin proficiency. Cheers!

You could start by creating some kind of service that accepts Bitcoin, that way you use your programing skills, and at the same time learn to integrate Bitcoin to your website. But for this you will also need experience in web development.