A curated list of awesome solana developer resources covering everything from docs, tutorials, courses, tooling and more.
Please submit a pull request if you know any resources that might be helpful to other developers!
- Why build on blockchain?
- Presentations
- Solana Dev Overview
- Use Cases
- Getting Started For Noobs
- Guides And Tutorials
- Video Learning Content
- Self Learning Courses
- Solana Explainers
- Tooling
- Ecosystem Docs and SDKs
- Open Source Repos
- Educational Programs
- For Ethereum Devs
- Security
If you're not new to Solana and just here for the resources, I hope this is helpful, but if you are new then I thought it would be helpful to give a brief explainer and overview to make the idea of building on a Solana a little less overwhelming. Also important to note that if you're coming from another blockchain then building on Solana is going to be a much different experience, so trying to make comparisons may be challenging and its almost best to come into this with the mindset of learning something for the first time. But don't worry its not as scary as it may seem.
I'll spare going into too much detail about Solana the blockchain and focus mainly on how to think about developing on Solana. But I'll leave you with this.
Solana is a blockchain built for mass adoption. It's a high performance network that is utilized for a range of use cases, including finance, NFTs, payments, and gaming. Solana operates as a single global state machine, and is open, interoperable and decentralized.
So you may have heard that in order to build on Solana you have to learn Rust. Well I'm here to tell you that this is far from the truth. If you want to write programs (smart contracts) on Solana, then you'll eventually need to learn Rust OR Anchor Framework, but that's not entirely necessarily to get started. Really all you need is software development knowledge and javascript/typescript experience. Due to the composable nature of Solana, you can leverage existing programs on the Solana blockchain and even build an entire project or business without ever needing to write a single Rust program yourself. That's really all up to you and your goals.
An easy way to think of Solana development is programs being server side (running on the blockchain), and all other development being client side. In order to interact with programs on the blockchain, all you really need is an SDK like Web3.js in order to send requests to those programs in order to update something on the blockchain or retrieve data from it. So if you're coming from web2, then simply put in relatable terms you can use client side SDKs to interact with the blockchain the same way you'd use an API in web2.
There are a wide variety of SDKs that exist today. Web3.js is a library for interacting with any Solana program, but there are specialized SDKs for things like payments, gaming, defi, NFTS, daos and more. You could essentially build a really cool app on Solana using a single SDK and never having to know anything about Rust or how the programs themselves work. It really can be that easy!
There are attitional tools that will give you even greater capabilities, and you can see that in the tooling section!
For a little more precise and in depth explanation for the above check out Introduction to Solana Development from the documentation!
If you're new to Solana development, I thought it would be useful to highlight a handful of usecases just to give you an idea of what is possible to build on a high performance blockchain that allows you to build web3 apps at the scale of of web2.
- Games and Entertainment
- Payments and Commerce
- NFTs
- Defi
- DePin
- RWA
- Permissioned Envionments
You can find tools to suit your needs for each of these use cases in the tooling section.
Your experience getting started with Solana development will vary depending on your interests and skill level, and in this section I'll be sharing some resources that should serve as good starting points in your Solana development journey.
If you're someone who just prefers to read documentation end-to-end feel free to hop on over to the Solana Docs and get rolling then head to THE Solana Course. Otherwise if you're not ready, continue reading this section for some lightweight learning.
- Introduction to Solana Development - A great introduction to important Solana development knowledge
- Important Concepts - concepts you should be familiar with as you start your solana journey
- Setup Your Environment - setting up a local environment is a good practice, but not required. Highly recommended.
- Hello World - build your first hello world app on chain using a Web IDE
- Solana Bytes - Video playlist of byte sized, important Solana concepts and a must watch.
- Solana Cookbook - One of the most popular resources for concepts, guides and reference code snippets
- Solana Bootcamp - An incredible 7 hour video playlist crash course on Solana development. Perfect for anyone looking to dive right in.
- Web3.js Library - primary client library for interacting with the solana blockchain in javascript
- create-solana-dapp - quickly spin up a solana application scaffold
- Solana Playground - Solana Program Web IDE
- Solana Stack Exchange - the perfect place to ask technical questions or search previously answered questions about solana development
- From Solana.com - Assortment of guides and tutorials from the main solana website
- SolAndy - a wide variety of solana developer content that is produced weekly
- Solana Bootcamp - An incredible 7 hour video playlist crash course on Solana development. Perfect for anyone looking to dive right in.
- THE Solana Course - An end to end, comprehensive, intermediate self learning course for all things Solana
- Freecodecamp - A fully intereactive Solana course on Freecodecamp that is taught directly from your Visual Studio Code IDE
- RiseIn - An excellent introductory Solana couse with both options for text and video based learning
- Ideasoft Rust/Solana Beginner - Great Solana/Rust course for beginners if you're interesting in building programs (smart contracts)
- Ideasoft Rust/Solana Advanced - Advanced course for those that complete the Ideasoft Rust/Solana beginner program
- Helius Blog - technical explainer posts for some of solanas most important and crucial pieces
- Dev Tooling List - list of current development tools for Solana
- Solana Core Docs - the core solana documentation
- Solana Pay - Payments made easy. Start building payments apps on Solana using only javascript/typescript
- Solana Open Source Software - another solana-awesome repo filled with open source projects to use as references and learning tools
- Web3BuildersAlliance
- Risein
- Encode
- Ackee
Coming soon...
Coming soon...