Vaskaran Sarcar - Simple and Efficient Programming with C#: Skills to Build Applications with Visual Studio and .NET

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Welcome to your journey through Simple and Efficient Programming with C#: Skills to Build Applications with Visual Studio and .NET. C# is an object-oriented programming (OOP) language. You may already know C# keywords, or even some interesting features. You may also know how to write simple programs in C#. You can learn these things from an introductory book or an online tutorial. These are useful things to know, but they are not sufficient to understand an enterprise codebase. This is why a novice programmer often finds it difficult to understand an experts code. He or she wonders why an experienced programmer wrote the program differently. It may appear to the novice that the expert could have used an easier approach to solve the problem. But there are reasons why an experienced programmer might follow a different approach. The word experienced indicates that these programmers have more experience in programming and know the pros and cons of different approaches. They know how the C# features can be used in the best possible way to develop an application. So, the applications they make are usually powerful. What do I mean by a powerful application? For me, a powerful application is robust, extensible, and easily maintainable, but simple to use. This book is an introductory guide to develop such applications. This is the core aim of this book.

To write better quality programs, senior programmers follow in experts footprints. They learn from collective wisdom and recorded experience from the past. So, instead of attempting an entirely new solution, you should first consider this knowledge base, which will help you produce better quality code. It is best to have some idea about why you should or shouldnt follow any specific guideline.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers (Little, Brown and Company), discussed the 10,000-hour rule. This rule says that the key to achieving world-class expertise in any skill is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing the correct way, for a total of around 10,000 hours. I acknowledge that it is impossible to consider all experiences before you write a program. Also, sometimes it is OK to bend the rules if the return on investment (ROI) is nice. So, keep in mind the Pareto principle, or 80-20 rule. This rule simply states that 80% of outcomes come from 20% of all causes. This is useful in programming too. When you identify the most essential characteristics of top-quality programs and use them in your applications, you also qualify yourself as an experienced programmer, and your application will be robust, flexible, and maintainable. In this book, I share with you these important principles, which will help you write better programs for case studies. Some of these principles you may know already, but when you see them in action and compare the case studies, youll understand their importance.

This book is intended for those who are familiar with the basic language constructs of C# and have an idea about pure object-oriented concepts like polymorphism, inheritance, abstraction, encapsulation, and, most important, how to compile or run a C# application in Visual Studio. This book does not invest time in easily available topics, such as how to install Visual Studio on your system, or how to write a Hello World program in C#, or how you can use an if-else statement or a while loop, etc. This book is written using the most basic features of C# so that for most of the programs herein you do not need to be familiar with advanced topics in C#. The examples are simple and straightforward. I believe that they are written in such a way that even if you are familiar with another popular language such as Java, C++, and so on, you can still easily grasp the concepts in this book.