API structure of Web3.js

Let me be very honest with you, going through the Web3.js library to find the suitable function required for our contract can be mind-boggling. This is the reason we need to consider the Web3.js 1.0 documentation as our perfect tour-guide brochure. The entire documentation is freely available at https://web3js.readthedocs.io/en/1.0/index.html.

In this section, we will visualize a map of the important APIs so that when we are actually coding our contracts, we can directly jump to the sections of the Web3.js documentation for specifications and parameter usage patterns.

As depicted in Figure 7.3, we have four sub-modules, namely web3-eth, web3-shh, web3-bzz, and web3-utils. In Figure 7.4, we have subdivided the web3-eth module into important sub-API modules. Each sub-module has several helper functions that can be called by a smart contract.

To complete any generic task available via helper function, the calling smart contract must spend ethers necessary for the operation...