Programming C# 4.0, 6th Edition

Chapter 3. Abstracting Ideas with Classes and Structs

In the previous couple of chapters, we looked at some basic programming techniques such as loops and conditions, and used some of the data types built into the language and platform, such as int and string.

Unfortunately, real programs—even fairly simple ones—are much, much more complicated than the examples we’ve built so far. They need to model the behavior of real-world objects like cars and planes, or ideas like mathematical expressions, or behaviors, like the transaction between you and your favorite coffee shop when you buy a double espresso and a brownie with your bank card.

Divide and Conquer

The best way to manage this complexity is to break a system down into manageable pieces, where each piece is small enough for us to understand completely. We should aim to craft each piece so that it fits neatly into the system as a whole with a small enough number of connections to the other pieces that we can comprehend all of those too.

Abstracting Ideas with Methods

We’ve already seen one tool for dividing our code into manageable pieces: methods. A method is a piece of a program that encapsulates a particular behavior completely. It’s worth understanding the benefits of methods, because the same principles apply to the classes and structs that are this chapter’s main subject.

Note

You will often see the term function used instead of method; they’re related, but not identical. A function is a method that returns something. Some methods ...