Absolute Beginner's Guide to Programming, Third Edition

The Basics of Visual Basic Data

Before you can write programs in a programming language, you must understand how that language handles different kinds of data. Only when you're able to represent data properly can you learn commands that manipulate and process that data. Data is the cornerstone for learning the rest of the Visual Basic programming language. Although writing code that initializes data might not seem to be as much fun as working with graphic controls on the form, you'll soon see how the code ties in with the controls. After you learn to present and process data, you'll be able to work with controls in more powerful ways than without the language inside the code window.

Data Types

Data falls into three broad categories:

• Numeric data ...