Decentralized Applications Harnessing Bitcoin’s Blockchain Technology by Siraj Raval is my follow up to three previous blockchain books. This kinda forks hard left after chapter two and drifts.
My first book Don Tapscott’s The Blockchain Revolution was interesting in broad strokes. William Mougayar’s The Business Blockchain was better.
Melanie Swan wrote an even better overview to in her book Blockchain: A blueprint for a new economy. Melanie provides a great overview (looking back from 2015) to address decentralized apps (Dapps), decentralized autonomous organization (DAOs), decentralized autonomous corporations (DACs) and decentralized autonomous societies (DASs). There is such a deeper dive required to wrap your arms around decentralized autonomous blockchains.
It was interesting to see Go code written into separate chapters dedicated to OpenBazaar, Lighthouse and La’Zooz. But I am not sure these Dapps are the correct examples to demonstrate blockchain technologies. Lighthouse is dead as stated on Github. LaZooz is a ride sharing dapp that in Go shows the backend but again kinda misses on the blockchain technology aspect. Only chapters one and two are worth your time.
The topic of Decentralized Bandwidth on page 31 was a bit of a stretch. I would suggest looking at The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler.
Now my focus is really turning towards The Science of the Blockchain by Roger Wattenhofer