Mastering Blockchain: Deeper insights into decentralization, cryptography, Bitcoin, and popular Blockchain frameworks Paperback – 17 Mar. 2017

Excellent effort! Good learning resource.

This is a very problematic book. I wanted to give it two stars because it serves as a moderately good history of blockchain and related technologies but in my opinion you could and should find better treatments for free on the web.The book doesn't deliver what it claims to and the author either doesn't understand many of the topics they talk about or how to explain them. Or both. The most obvious example is the section on cryptography. The author begins by introducing algebraic concepts which they claim are necessary for understanding concepts introduced later in the book.They really aren't, and they are introduced incompetently. This whole section looks as though the author doesn't really understand the subject and has copied and pasted from various sources. The author introduces algebraic concepts beginning with sets but in explaining how to get from sets to groups and rings and so on mentions concepts they don't bother to define.But it doesn't matter anyway, because those concepts are not useful in understanding anything else in the text. They're filler and to make the author look mathematically competent, which is a dubious claim at best. A hamfisted treatment of algebra really doesn't help anyone understand how blockchain works.Different examples use different sorts of notation, which is always a worry. The examples themselves are... not really examples. They are mentions of examples.The promises of practical examples are unfounded. There's nothing in this book that will help you develop a blockchain application.The text itself is highly repetitive. Virtually every paragraph serves to explain what the text is about to explain, then just explains that it will be explained later. It never is, to any useful degree.The book could have used a better editor: there are many instances of weirdly ambiguous text and cases where sentences could have been easily corrected to be less broken. I don't blame the author for this, surely an editor could have fixed those problems. That didn't occur.I really hate writing bad reviews. I've had plenty of bad reviews myself and I know how it feels. But this book pretends to do something it doesn't and the author doesn't deserve my money or anyone else's, sorry.