If you've ever thought a career as a Web3 developer sounded attractive but didn't know where to start, you're not alone.

As the blockchain sector has grown, so has demand for smart contract developers—and there aren't enough devs to keep up. The good news is that, while the best developers have years of experience under their belts and shoulder a high degree of responsibility, it's actually not too difficult to get started.

Solidity From Scratch

If you're wondering whether you're cut out for life as a Web3 dev and want to dip your toe in the water, the CryptoZombies course could be for you. It's a fun and unthreatening way to learn the basics of Solidity, with a browser-based series of lessons that walk you through key concepts and get you to build a simple dApp, checking your code at every step.

The Beginner's Solidity course has six lessons, broken down into small chunks (for example, the first lesson has 15 steps, most of which include a short exercise). How long each lesson takes will depend a little on what prior experience you have—a certain familiarity with core concepts is assumed, so knowing another programming language will always be helpful, though is not strictly essential—but might realistically be completed in 30-60 minutes by most people.

By the end of the first lesson, you'll have learned the basics of Solidity, including declaring different data types (which are used to store numbers, strings, and other information), creating functions (which actually do things with that data and other inputs), and communicating on-chain changes to the outside world (your dApp's website frontend).

CryptoZombies won't make you a rock star smart contract engineer. What it should do, however, is give you a good sense of whether this is for you: Whether you understood the concepts you were being walked through, whether you showed aptitude in solving the problems set, and whether you enjoyed learning some Solidity. If the answer to these is "Yes", then keep going!

If you didn't engage well with the material—people learn in different ways, and not everyone's a fan of zombies—then don't worry: There are lots of other resources for learning Solidity on the web. As a side note, if you get stuck anywhere, then you can simply reveal the answer, and you can of course find more information on an any given topic by searching for it on the web, though the whole site is pretty self-explanatory and self-contained.

Learn Solidity and take other Web3 courses at CryptoZombies.io, and follow @CryptoZombiesHQ on Twitter.

Subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Twitter.