I started working on this book on more than two years ago while taking a year-long leave of absence from more traditional work in the crypto space. The Quilt team over at ConsenSys was kind enough to sponsor development of this work for a period of several months. I also recieved a grant for parts of this book via MolochDAO for which I'm extremely grateful. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to finish the book before I ran out of money and turned back towards full-time employment (with Optimism, where I still currently work).
This book was originally titled "The Eth2 Book". I've since decided that I care more about writing a book about all of the beauty of Ethereum, rather than focusing just on the Eth2 components. I'm now in the process of reworking the book to be about Ethereum in general, so you'll probably still see lots of references to Eth2 while I clean things up.
So here we are, with Kelvin's Ethereum Book.
Currently, the book is mostly unpolished and unedited. Large portions of the skeleton of the book have been filled in, but there are likely to be many missing details, spelling errors, and grammatical mistakes. My philosophy in writing this book has been a "breadth-first" approach as I find that overall content structure and layout is the most important part of an educational work. Smaller details, like headings, links, citations, etc., are best to be left toward the end of the project (lest we remove an entire section and waste a significant amount of effort).
I still feel this is the right way to work on a project of this magnitude, but I acknowledge that it may make parts of the book hard to read in its current state. I hope that by making the work public I can start to crowd-source a lot of these smaller details. Anyway, this is all to say that the book is definitely not complete in any sense of the word and I hope you'll bear with me as the kinks get worked out.
It's also worth noting that Eth2 has changed quite a bit since this project was started. Some parts of this book (particularly in the later chapters) are likely wholly inaccurate or outdated. As referenced in the above section regarding the Eth2 rebrand, it's a top priority to review the book for any inaccuracies and to make sure that it matches the narrative around Eth2 as it stands today.
Now that you've read all of my disclaimers, you can find the latest version of the book at the following link:
Content on that page should update automatically whenever changes are made to this repository.
Any and all contributions to this work are very much appreciated. As a way of saying thank you to contributors, I will be creating hand-drawn NFTs for everyone who submits suggestions, edits, or other similar contributions (on Optimism, because I'm biased and also because it's way cheaper than sending NFTs on L1 and I'm not made of money). You'll also be credited as a contributor within the book itself.
Please see the Contributing Guide for more information about the contributing process.