Rod Stephens - Start Here! Fundamentals of Microsoft .NET Programming

Programming languages do one very simple thing: they allow you to write programs that tell the computer what to do. You can tell a computer to read a value from the keyboard, add two numbers, save a result in a file on the hard disk, or draw a smiley face on the screen.

No matter what programming language you use, the underlying commands that the computer can execute are exactly the same. Whether you use Java, C#, Microsoft Visual Basic, COBOL, LISP, or any other language, you can make the computer perform roughly the same tasks. Two languages may have very different syntaxes, and some languages make some tasks easier than others, but the fundamental operations they can perform are the same. All these languages can carry out numeric calculations and manipulate files; unfortunately, none of them can reliably pick lottery winners. (If you write a program that can, let me know!)

At a more conceptual level, programming concepts have been refined over the years until most modern languages share a common set of fundamental concepts, such as variables, classes, objects, forms, menus, files, and multiprocessing. Dont worry if you dont know what these arethe purpose of this book is to provide more information about such terms and concepts.

Because programming languages share so many operations and concepts, programming books tend to cover the same topics as well. Books about databases or graphics cover these specialized topics in great detail. Different authors may place emphasis on different subjects, but theres a lot of overlap, particularly in beginning and general how to program books. Every one of these books explains what a variable is, how to create objects, and what a text file contains.

All this means that if you want to learn more than one programming language (a practice that I highly recommend), youre going to encounter much of the same material repeatedly. Even if you skim the familiar sections, you still have to pay for the content. You may start with a 600-page book about Visual Basic programming. Later, when you buy a 500-page C# book, youll discover that 200 of those pages cover things you already know. Next, when your boss decides you need to learn LISP, youll find that your new 550-page book contains 100 pages that you already know. (There are a lot of differences between LISP and the other two languages, so there will be less overlap if you shift to that language.)

This edition of the Start Here! series changes all that. Rather than making each Start Here! book cover the exact same topics, those common topics have been moved into this volume for easy reference. Now if you read Start Here! Learn Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Programming or Start Here! Learn Microsoft Visual Basic Programming, you wont need to rehash the exact same topics. Instead, those books refer you to this one for background information, such as how disk buffering works, freeing the other books to focus on language-specific issues.

There still will be some overlap between any books about different languages. For example, Visual Basic and C# both let you read and write disk files. Although Start Here! Fundamentals of .NET Programming explains in general what disk files are and how programs interact with them, the other books still need to explain the syntax for the code that their respective languages use to read and write files.

Note that this book doesnt necessarily cover every last detail of each background topic. It just gives you the information you need to understand how programs fit into a larger context so that you can get the most out of them. For example, this book explains some important programming issues relating to disk drives, but it doesnt explain in detail how disk drives work.

Moving underlying common topics into this separate book provides several benefits, including the following: