Where to begin?

So the first thing to do when learning a new language is obviously to find some reference materials. In this post I’ll look at C# references.  I’ll leave .NET to later, when we start to get into it.

C# was created by Microsoft so the logical first place to go would be the MSDN Library.  As typical in MSDN there’s a full reference, including tutorials and the language specification.

A quick Google search turns up a large number of on-line tutorials and reference cards, a few of which are:

• C# Station tutorial
• Softsteel Solutions C# tutorial
• FunctionX has tutorials for each version of the C# language to date: 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0
• C# Basics Reference Sheet from </dream-in-code>
• Core C# and .NET Quick Reference
• C# Syntax Reference Card

I’ll link some of these in the side-bar as I use them.

As well as a language reference it’s also a good idea to have an idea of how you want to learn.  For me, I learn best by doing.  A month-or-so ago I heard, I can’t remember where, about a blog post detailing the 15 exercises the author went through in learning a new language.  In searching for this post last week I also found a series of follow-up posts by another programmer with some more advanced exercises.

So I figured it would be a good idea to work through these exercises myself, and document it all here.  As I complete each exercise I’ll blog about it, including the code, and highlighting the aspects of the language learned in the exercise.

I also have an idea or two for a couple of actual projects that I’d like to complete, but more about that later.

Next time I’ll be getting started on actual code.