Getting started with C#.

Here is a simple strategy for learning C#.

• Talk to other people about C#. See if they can answer your questions. Try answering their questions. It will help you understand how much you know about C# and what C# skills you may need to improve.

• Try to interest somebody in C#. Share your ideas about .Net with your relatives and friends. There are several reasons for doing so. First, you cannot really say that you know something unless you can explain it to a layman. Second, software products are made for laymen. Your future client may have no idea about properties and indexers, but she may want to have a software which can automate  certain tasks for her. You will need to show that C# can do the job.
• Programming is a community effort. Get to know other programmers. See what they think about different issues of C#. Tell them what you think about these issues. When you post to a newsgroup, make your questions short and clear to understand.
• When something in your program does not work, do not panic. Try asking other people or  reading a book which may have a discussion of the subject. If everything else fails, use global perspective strategy: Try to identify related problems to the one you are having. Here is a simple example: You forgot to include System namespace into a program. When trying to compile the program, you get compilation errors. You have read the program several times, but do not seem to be able to find anything wrong with it. What can you do? If your program was supposed to output "Hello World" on the console, the first thing to try would be to change "Hello World" to "I am Lost". Since it does not help, you remove Console.WriteLine from your program. If the program had only one statement, compiler would no longer complain. At this point, you realize that there was something wrong with Console.WriteLine. But, since Console.WriteLine looks just fine, you conclude that there might be something wrong with the namespace declaration, and here is when you notice that using System is missing from your program.
• Do not give up. There are thousands of programmers who probably had a problem similar to yours while studying C# and who are doing very well. So it is only a matter of time before you find a solution to the problem.
• Get a good C# book for beginners.

Copyright© 2002-2006 Aleksey Nudelman