The Basics of C#

Summary

I wanted in this chapter to give you a quick tour of C# and the kinds of things you can do with it. The programmers among you will by now have had a lot of their questions answered, but also a lot more will have come up. For example, what about interfaces and structures, abstract classes, reference types and value types, scoping, and so on?

The newcomers among you will also have a lot of questions, I’m sure. This chapter covered a lot of the very basics of C# but I intentionally avoided a great many details. It would take an entire book to cover the language and what you can do with it (this book in fact), but C# is one of those languages where it’s hard to explain any one thing without introducing a whole bunch of others.

So, in Chapter 3 you’ll dig a lot deeper, starting out with working with data in your programs, revisiting control structures, and looking at some of the nuances and trip wires C# brings with it when working with these things. So consider what you just read as a video walk-through of just what the theme park holds. In the next chapter you’ll get to go on some of the rides.