I’ve been learning more about the Solana Ecosystem and pulling together resources that could be helpful to folks that are starting to build on Solana.
Solana uses a language called Rust which is used at companies like Dropbox, Yelp, and Mozilla. Rust is a powerful language but many teams (and engineers) particularly in emerging markets (like Africa) often don’t know where to start as the documentation and tooling on Rust for Solana is still early.
The common feedback from experienced Solana developers is to write Anchor, not core Solana as you’ll reduce boilerplate code by an order of magnitude, and get stronger security guarantees out of the box. A lot of common FAQs also live in the Anchor Discord so be sure to search there in addition to other sources.
Here are some helpful resources to get you started:
Getting Started Guides
- https://solana.com/news/getting-started-with-solana-development – The official getting started guide.
- https://www.startonsolana.com/ – A set of challenges to get started building by Questbook (mobile first learning)
- https://learn.figment.io/pathways/solana-pathway – Step by step guide to building your first project.
- https://paulx.dev/blog/2021/01/14/programming-on-solana-an-introduction/ – A really nice intro guide from a member of the community.
- https://www.soldev.app/ – A bunch of more specific walk throughs to check out.
Developer Docs
- https://solana.com/developers – A bunch of really useful developer resources.
- https://project-serum.github.io/anchor/getting-started/introduction.html – The Anchor framework provides a bunch of really useful developer tools and is highly recommended.
- https://github.com/project-serum/anchor/tree/master/tests/escrow – check out the escrow example.
- https://paulx.dev/blog/2021/01/14/programming-on-solana-an-introduction/ – A really great guide, but requires familiarity with Rust.
- https://solana-labs.github.io/solana-web3.js/ – A great resource for JS devs.
- https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ – The Rust docs are great, some of the best for any language, in case you want to go really deep.
Metaplex (For NFTs)
Metaplex is a self hosted platform for launching NFTs on Solana. Over 2M NFTs have been minted so far using Metaplex.
- https://github.com/metaplex – Metaplex is open source and you can access the code here.
- https://docs.metaplex.com/ – The docs are comprehensive and well written.
- https://hackmd.io/@levicook/HJcDneEWF – The “missing guide” on how to use the metaplex candy machine.
- https://github.com/exiled-apes/candy-machine-mint – Has some extra detail on building a React app.
Note: I ran this by a few experienced developers on Solana, but it’s all changing super fast and most learning happens live, with other people. join the Anchor Discord and the Solana Discord.
Aadil Mamujee 
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