Blockchain Technology: Blockchain for Dummies review

 

If you need to learn about blockchain technology, give “Blockchain for Dummies” by Tiana Laurence a try. It is a standard For Dummies book that deep dives on the subject of cryptocurrencies and blockchains with a generalist approach.

It’s five parts, 29 chapters.

 

If you read it, you’ll get up to snuff on cryptos very fast, because of the extensive hands-on approach of this book.

 

I could have used the information on this book in 2012-2013, but I couldn’t find anything like it. If you are new to the subject and think that your crypto skills could benefit from a crash course, I recommend you read it.

 

What I wanted finally appeared in 2017, it was “Blockchain for Dummies” and with something as bleeding-edge as cryptos, it’s always better late than never.

 

Get a Blockchain Technology Rundown in a Flash

Simple, read this book. The blockchains that “Blockchain for Dummies” gives instructions on how to get started are:

The things I learned from “Blockchain for Dummies”, I could never learn them as fast as I learned when I read this book.

 

It gives a detailed explanation of the blockchains and the crypto-currencies powering them. It also has parts considering the cases of cryptos as related to fintech, real estate, insurance, government, and other industries.

 

I personally, could find tidbits of information here and there about the data on this book, but never in an orderly, efficient manner that gives the facts of all the most important blockchains and touches other topics of interest related to cryptos and blockchain technology.

 

Because the approach is orderly, its contents can give themselves the luxury of being general, but at the same time in-depth. The chapters are long, and none of the technologies received the thin content treatment in this book.

 

Each of the blockchain and its crypto coins I listed above makes a chapter of Part 2, Developing Your Knowledge. “Blockchain for Dummies” explains what each crypto coin and blockchain are about.

 

I said I could use this book around 2012-2013 because of going overseas around that time and needed a global no-nonsense money transfer method.  I got nothing of the sort and ended up enthralled under HSBC’s suzerainty. This book could have come in handy, even if finding somebody who would exchange from a crypto wallet to cash would have been nigh impossible to find where I was at.

 

From then up to last year, I haven't seriously sat with quality material to focus on learning some useful content on the blockchain. I'm happy that I did it last year with this book. I used this book as a measuring rod of my knowledge of blockchain and I was faced with the fact that I didn’t have practically any.

 

The knowledge about cryptos, all the time I searched for consumer-grade information about it, was very sparse and I didn’t have good luck finding a consolidated resource about them like this book is.

 

I’m going to tell now why I think this book was extremely interesting and why I think it’s a has-to-have if one doesn’t know the basics of cryptos. 

It's not enough to gain a holistic, integral knowledge of the blockchains with articles from the web. Not for a newbie who doesn't know where to begin, anyway.

I bet it would take a long time to go through everything that this book teaches in just over 200 pages for a newbie. It may sound silly to say a pun like this one: I think that knowledge about cryptos is cryptic, besides also sounding subjective, but that was my personal luck, or rather lack of it, pertaining to researching these technologies with only search engines.

Believe me, if I tell you that you’ll never achieve a competitive knowledge of this technology that is exhaustive without an introductory guide like this book. When it’s about cryptos, exhaustive knowledge is of the essence.

I learned from this book that crypto business models are most of the time very similar, but factually that’s not always the case. Some are very innovative and different and this book goes a great length to let one know the differences and similarities.

The last chapter even has ten case studies of blockchain-based projects to leave you thinking about the possibilities of this disruptive technology. 

Read it, and later Consult it

This book was fun to read from start to finish, but the most important thing is that once you finish it, you can still use it for a long time as a reference book.

In fact, like another For Dummies book, is up to you how you read it because For Dummies books make great reference material and they don’t need to be read from start to finish if one doesn’t think one should.

 

This book explains practical ways to get started with the blockchains and crypto coins it covers. I wouldn’t go all-in, reading this book from start to finish, doing everything it explains, registering wallets, and doing other activities with all the cryptos it features.

 

Still, if you want to do it for one or more of them,  it gives detailed instructions on how to get started in all of them. 

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Jack Moreh
IBM Research