In this chapter, you learned how to install a web3 library. This is the library that is designed to connect to a smart contract. On top of that, you learned how to run an Ethereum node on the Rinkeby network. You configured web3 to connect to the Ethereum blockchain on the Rinkeby network. You also learned how to tell web3 to connect to an Ethereum testing network, such as Ganache. In addition, you created a script to send ethers from one account to another. Finally, you created a script to execute methods on a smart contract, either to read the value of public variables or to change the state of the smart contract.
In the next chapter, you are going to use a smart contract development framework called Populus that takes care of the manual work you've undertaken in relation to a smart contract, such as compiling the code and deploying it. In addition, the Populus...