Compose your first software applications with programming maestro Charles Petzold.

Learning to program is like learning a musical instrument. It takes dedication, lots of practice, and a great teacher. This primer-created by award-winning author Charles Petzold-focuses on the fundamentals of composing code with C#, an intuitive object-oriented programming language ideal for creating solutions for Microsoft1' Windows* and the Web. Along the way you can take lyrical sidetrips into the history, culture, and jargon of software development. Whether you're new to programming or new to C#, you'll quickly build the skills you need to orchestrate your own applications in the key of C#.

Discover how to:

• Start simple with variables-integers and text strings
• Learn the Basics of user input and output
• Get deeper into dsta types with decimals and floating point
• Explore how Booleans help a program make decisions
• Branch, loop, and enumerate to perform selective and repetitive tasks
• Help prevent your programs from crashing with structured exception handling
• Assemble classes from fields, methods, and properties
• Extend classes with inheritance, operators, and virtual methods
• Store information in data files
• Write a program to olay music in the key of C#

Contents

• Beginnings
  • You the Programmer
  • First Assignments
  • Declarations of Purpose
  • Edit, Compile, Run
  • Console Output
  • Arithmetic and Its Shortcuts
  • Comments
• Basic Types
  • Integers and the .NET Framework
  • Text Strings
  • The Stack and the Heap
  • String Conversion
  • Console Input
  • Constants
  • Decimals
  • Floating Point
  • Fancy Formatting
  • Methods and Fields
  • Arrays
  • Booleans
  • Characters and Strings
• Ifs and Loops
  • Comparisons
  • Making Decisions
  • The Conditional Operators
  • The While Loop
  • Catching Exceptions
  • For and Foreach
  • The Infamous Goto
  • Switch and Case
  • Bits and Enumerations
  • Parameters and Arguments
• Objects
  • Encapsulating Data
  • Instance Methods
  • Constructors
  • Concepts of Equality
  • Fields and Properties
  • Inheritance
  • Virtually
  • Operator Overloading
  • Classes and Libraries
  • Framework Essentials
  • Coda
• Index