I am very new to bitcoin. I have only read an introductory book on the technology and I have an Oriley book on bitcoin on order. I am looking for a manual or guide that describes the standard interfaces to to the blockchain and transaction information so that I can try to design my own mine (for fun only of course)
Any help would be appreciated.
'Mastering Bitcoin' is where you can start
https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbookFirst, you need to download bitcoin core, after that, you will realize you can use bitcoin form the GUI, or from the command line...
will show you all the commands available.
Design your own miner is another thing, first you can start mining with CPU to understand how it works, but for that, you don't need bitcoin core, you need
https://sourceforge.net/projects/cpuminer/.