Faster Smarter Beginning Programming

Key Points

• Visual Basic .NET, like most programming languages, provides a variety of data types that are suited for different kinds of data.

• Literals are values that you supply directly as part of program statements; 17, 62.5, and "shovel" are all literals.

• Variables are named areas of memory that contain data of a specific type. Because you always refer to variables by name, their physical memory locations aren’t important.

• Constants are, in essence, read-only variables. Declaring a given value as a constant makes your code easier to read and guarantees uniformity.

• The setting Option Explicit Off tells the Visual Basic .NET compiler to create any variables you forget to declare. This usually causes more problem than it solves. Option Explicit On ...