Hey,I would probably say the white paper for BitCoin is a good place to understand what a blockchain does, I find the yellow paper for Ethereum more useful for development. You probably want to run a private nodes for ethereum, & a dev node for bitcoin, cheaper & no issues of space to experiment on both. Genesis file for bitcoin is quite interesting for a soft fork. I've tried to used both React & Meteor as webframeworks for a possible dapp..had more luck with Meteor-:) Tried to connect heroku to a private chain as well..Got distracted but it seemed feasible -:) Lots & lots of solidity code on github by Ethereum developers & & even an open source framework to do static code analysis for security -:) Lots of stuff on developers on bitcoin.org. Ethereum has diff versions, so you want to look at the documentation for the latest version byzatine, i think & it was also quite interesting thar they have multiple clients in diff langs, i just started with one & got used to that -;) Information from previous versions is also useful. Lots of altcoins are also opensource so Good Luck building -:)