Beginning Visual Basic 2012

Chapter 3

Writing Software

What You Will Learn in this Chapter

• Understanding algorithms
• Using variables
• Exploring different data types, including integers, floating-point numbers, strings, and dates
• Studying code scope
• Understanding debugging applications basics
• Understanding how computers store data in memory

Wrox.com Code Downloads for this Chapter

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=1118311813 on the Download Code tab. The code is in the 311813 C03.zip download and individually named according to the names given throughout the chapter.

Now that you have Visual Basic 2012 up and running and have even written a simple program, you're going to look at the fundamentals behind the process of writing software and start putting together some exciting programs of your own.

Information and Data

Information describes facts and can be presented or found in any format, whether that format is optimized for humans or computers. For example, if you send four people to different intersections to manually survey traffic, at the end of the process you will end up with four handwritten tallies of the number of cars that went past (say, a tally for each hour).

The term data is used to describe information that has been collated, ordered, and formatted so it can be used by a piece of computer software. The information you have (several notebooks full of handwritten tallies) cannot be directly used by a piece of software. Instead, someone has ...