_Follow along with this video:_ --- ## Foundry Fundamentals Welcome to Foundry 101. Throughout this course, you will acquire the skills you’ll need to start developing your smart contracts and protocols using the best web3 development tools and frameworks like **_Chainlink_**, **_Alchemy_**, and **_Foundry_**. ### What is Foundry? Foundry is a relatively new but rapidly growing smart contract development framework known for its efficiency and modularity. The best short description of this powerful tool can be found in the [Foundry Book](https://book.getfoundry.sh/): ``` Foundry manages your dependencies, compiles your project, runs tests, deploys, and lets you interact with the chain from the command-line and via Solidity scripts. ``` Please take a moment to bookmark the [Foundry Book](https://book.getfoundry.sh/). It is the most comprehensive resource that has the answers to all your questions. It will be handy along the way. Foundry has numerous pros, such as: - It **leverages Rust** for compilation, offering significantly faster build times compared to frameworks like Hardhat or Brownie. - It's entirely **Solidity-based**, eliminating the need to learn other programming languages - Its **documentation is comprehensive**. ### Our favorite code editor: Visual Studio Code Throughout this course, we will use Visual Studio Code to **write**, **test**, **deploy** and **interact** with our smart contracts. Visual Studio Code is a lightweight, powerful source code editor available on Windows, macOS and Linux. It has a comprehensive ecosystem of extensions that makes it one of the best choices when it comes to smart contract development.