Intro to Wire Protocols
Learn how to write a protocol to tell a friend how many fruits to buy at the market.
About this course:
This is a free online course that walks you through designing a protocol from scratch. Learn how to write and parse byte-level protocols for fixed, variable-length and TLVs.
What to know before class (pre-requisites):
Knowing some Python would be helpful for this class, as well as endian-ness.
If you haven’t seen the Encodings + Endianness explainer by @niftynei yet, I’d recommend you give it a look.
Topics we'll cover:
Write messages of fixed length to send over the wire
Read and write messages to byte packets
Learn how to expand and existing protocol with new fields
Send data of an unknown size with variable length protocols
Write your own type-length-value (TLV) protocol from scratch in python.
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"I thought I knew how transactions worked in bitcoin up until I took the class. It is a deep, byte by byte dive into the different types of transactions, understandable for non-coding people. Just have an open mindset, let yourself be taught the most basic bitcoin-cli and python commands, and you are good to go. I was afraid it would be too technical, and don't get me wrong, it does get into the roots of how the transaction protocols work, but nifty managed to keep it simple and clear enough for someone with a basic bitcoin knowledge to follow."
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