After the Try It's Step-by-Step section, the lesson concludes with extra exercises that you can solve for further practice and to expand the lesson's main ideas. Some of the exercises extend the material in the main lesson, so I recommend that you at least skim the exercises and ask yourself if you think you could do them. Solutions to the Try Its and all of the exercises are available for download on the book's website. Additional screencasts show how to work through many of the exercises.
Websites
To find the book's web page, go to www.wrox.com/go/csharp24hourtrainer2e. There you can find solutions to all of the Try Its and exercises, plus some additional resources. You can view the screencasts at www.wrox.com/go/csharp24hourtrainer2evideos.
The one thing that a good classroom experience has that this book doesn't is direct interaction. You can't shout questions at the instructor, work in a team with fellow students, and discuss exercises with other students in the campus coffee house.
Although the book itself can't help here, you can do at least three things to get this kind of interaction. First, join the Wrox P2P (peer-to-peer) discussion forum for this book. As the section “P2P.WROX.COM” later in this lesson says, you can join the discussion forum to post questions, provide answers, see what other readers are doing with the book's material, and generally keep tabs on book-related topics.
You can also sign up for other discussion groups on the Internet, too. You can post questions on those discussions, but it's also very interesting to see what other people are asking. Book discussion groups often don't have as much traffic, so the topics tend to be more limited than those in these other groups. (Although I watch my P2P groups closely, so go there if you want me to answer.)
Finally, if you get stuck on an exercise or some other program you're working on, e-mail me at [email protected]. I won't solve the exercises for you but I'll try to clarify problems or give you the hints you need to solve them yourself.
Getting the Most out of the Book
This book provides a lot of tools that you can use to best match your learning style, but you have to use them. If you learn best by reading text, spend more time on the text. If you like step-by-step instructions, focus on the Try Its and their step-by-step instructions. If you learn best by watching and listening, focus on the screencasts.
Then, after you've finished a lesson, use the exercises to verify that you've mastered the material. Most of the lessons are fairly easy to just read through quickly. Unless you practice what you've learned, you can't be sure it's sticking, so plan to spend some time on the exercises. It would not be strange to spend half an hour reading the lesson and then several hours working through the Try It and exercises.
And don't be afraid to invent programs of your own. Just because an idea isn't in the book doesn't mean it wouldn't make good practice. Modify the programs you build for the exercises to find out what you can accomplish.
How This Book Is Structured
This book is divided into seven sections, each containing a series of short lessons. The lessons are generally arranged in order, with later lessons depending on earlier ones, so you should study the lessons more or less in order, at least through the first four sections. The lessons in sections V, VI, and VII cover slightly more specialized topics and you can study them in any order.
Many of the exercises are tagged with a topic as in [Games] or [WPF]. Those indicate a theme that you may find interesting. For example, the [Games] exercises involve techniques that you may find useful if you want to build game programs. The topics include:
● [WPF] – These ask you to use WPF. They are often harder than corresponding Windows Forms programs, but they sometimes produce better-looking results. (You also need to use WPF to build tablet-style and Windows Phone apps.)
● [Games] – These are generally amusing or demonstrate techniques that may be useful in building game programs.
● [SimpleEdit] – This is a simple word processing application that is built and enhanced over a sequence of exercises in several lessons.
● [Drawing] – These exercises make a program that draws lines and shapes.
● [Hard] – Exercises with this tag are generally harder than most of the other exercises so they may take some extra time. (I bet you guessed that!)
● [Advanced] – These exercises use more advanced techniques and may be harder.
● [Bonus] – These exercises extend the topic covered in the lesson and include extra instructions for performing a technique not covered in the main lesson.
Persistent Programs
Many of the exercises ask you to edit an earlier version of a program. Just copy the previous version into a new directory and modify it there. (The section “Copying Projects” in Lesson 1 explains how to do that.)
If you skip an exercise, you may later not have a version that you need to copy. In that case just download the version you need from the book's website.
For example, the instructions for Exercise 24-1 ask you to copy the program you built for Exercise 23-1. If you skipped that exercise, you can download the Lesson 23 material from the book's website and use the version that it contains.
The book's sections are:
● I: The Visual Studio IDE and Controls– These lessons explain how to use the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) and how to use the controls that make up a user interface. You need to study these lessons to get started.
● II: Variables and Calculations– These lessons deal with variables and calculations. They explain what variables are and how a program can use them to calculate results. They also explain how to debug programs.
● III: Program Statements– These lessons describe program statements and syntax. They explain how to control the program's flow, make decisions, and repeat operations.
● IV: Classes– These lessons deal with classes. They explain how to create and use classes and how to use more advanced class features such as generics and operator overloading.
● V: System Interactions– These lessons explain ways in which a program can interact with the operating system by reading and writing files and by generating printouts.
● VI: Windows Apps– These sections explain how you can build Windows Store and Windows Phone apps.
● VII: Specialized Topics– These lessons introduce topics that don't fit well in the other sections. They explain how to localize programs for different parts of the world, how to build simple database programs, and how to use Language Integrated Query (LINQ) to manipulate data in objects and databases.
What You Need to Use This Book
To get the most out of this book, you need to install Visual Studio and C#. You don't need any fancy version of Visual Studio or C# Professional Edition. In fact, Visual Studio Professional and the other full-featured versions don't really add all that much that you're likely to want to use for a long time. Mostly they add support for performing unit tests, managing test cases, profiling code, building code libraries, and performing other tasks that are more useful for programming teams than they are for individuals.
To work through this book, the Community Edition should be good enough. (And it's free!)
NOTE
In previous versions of Visual