Beginning C# 6.0 Programming with Visual Studio 2015

Chapter 3Variables and Expressions

What you will learn in this chapter

• Understanding basic C# syntax
• Using variables
• Using expressions

Wrox.com Code Downloads for this Chapter

You can find the wrox.com code downloads for this chapter at www.wrox.com/go/beginningvisualc#2015programming on the Download Code tab. The code is in the Chapter 3 download and individually named according to the names throughout the chapter.

To use C# effectively, it's important to understand what you're actually doing when you create a computer program. Perhaps the most basic description of a computer program is that it is a series of operations that manipulate data. This is true even of the most complicated examples, including vast, multi-featured Windows applications (such as the Microsoft Office Suite). Although this is often completely hidden from users of applications, it is always going on behind the scenes.

To illustrate this further, consider the display unit of your computer. What you see onscreen is often so familiar that it is difficult to imagine it as anything other than a “moving picture.” In fact, what you see is only a representation of some data, which in its raw form is merely a stream of 0s and 1s stashed away somewhere in the computer's memory. Any onscreen action — moving a mouse pointer, clicking on an icon, typing text into a word processor — results in the shunting around of data in memory.

Of course, simpler situations show this just as well. When using a calculator ...