Beginning C# 3.0

Chapter 1. Getting Started

Welcome to the world of object-oriented programming and C#! The primary goal of this book is to use the C# programming language from Microsoft to teach you object-oriented programming, or OOP. This book assumes that you have no prior programming experience in any language and that you know nothing about OOP.

If you do have programming experience and some familiarity with OOP, that's fine. Having that experience makes things easier for you. However, I still encourage you to read the book from start to finish for a number of reasons. First, this book represents the distillation of 25 years of programming and teaching experience. I have a good idea of what works and what doesn't work when it comes to explaining complex topics so that they're easy to understand. Reading each chapter gives you the tools to understand the next chapter. Second, I may introduce topics in one chapter and then rely heavily on those topics in a much later chapter. In other words, the process used to learn OOP and C# is one that introduces new topics based upon ones that were introduced earlier. Obviously, it's important to master the earlier content before tackling the later content. Finally, the programming examples I use also build on concepts presented in earlier program examples. It will be easier for you to understand the later program examples if you've experimented with those programs introduced earlier in the book.

One more thing: You cannot learn programming by just reading ...