The Developer Guide aims to provide the information you need to understand Bitcoin and start building Bitcoin-based applications, but it is not a specification. To make the best use of this documentation, you may want to install the current version of Bitcoin Core, either from source or from a pre-compiled executable.
Questions about Bitcoin development are best asked in one of the Bitcoin development communities. Errors or suggestions related to documentation on Bitcoin.org can be submitted as an issue or posted to the bitcoin-documentation mailing list.
In the following documentation, some strings have been shortened or wrapped: "[...]" indicates extra data was removed, and lines ending in a single backslash "\" are continued below. If you hover your mouse over a paragraph, cross-reference links will be shown in blue. If you hover over a cross-reference link, a brief definition of the term will be displayed in a tooltip.