and tightly focused on a single task so you can finish each one in a single sitting. You shouldn't need to stop in the middle of a lesson and leave concepts half-learned (at least if you turn off your phone).
NOTE
The “24-Hour” in the title means the book is available to train you 24 hours per day, not that you should be able to read then entire book in 24 hours. Unless you just skim the text and skip all of the Try Its and exercises, I'd be surprised if anyone could work through the whole thing in 24 hours.
After describing the main concept, the lesson includes a Try It section that invites you to perform a programming exercise to solidify the lesson's ideas.
The Try It has several subsections. Lesson Requirements describes the exercise so you know what should happen. Hints gives pointers about possible confusing aspects of the problem, if they're needed. Step-by-Step provides a numbered series of steps that show how to solve the problem.
A screencast on the accompanying DVD shows me working through the Try It problem. Additional commentary at the end of the screencast highlights extensions of the lesson's main concepts.
After the Try It's Step-by-Step section, the lesson concludes with extra exercises that you can solve for further practice and to expand the lesson's main ideas. Some of the exercises extend the material in the main lesson, so I recommend that you at least skim the exercises and ask yourself if you think you could do them. Solutions to the Try Its and all of the exercises are available for download on the book's website. Additional screencasts show how to work through many of the exercises.
Websites
To find the book's web page, go to www.wrox.com/go/csharp24hourtrainer2e. There you can find solutions to all of the Try Its and exercises, plus some additional resources. You can view the screencasts at www.wrox.com/go/csharp24hourtrainer2evideos.
The one thing that a good classroom experience has that this book doesn't is direct interaction. You can't shout questions at the instructor, work in a team with fellow students, and discuss exercises with other students in the campus coffee house.
Although the book itself can't help here, you can do at least three things to get this kind of interaction. First, join the Wrox P2P (peer-to-peer) discussion forum for this book. As the section “P2P.WROX.COM” later in this lesson says, you can join the discussion forum to post questions, provide answers, see what other readers are doing with the book's material, and generally keep tabs on book-related topics.
You can also sign up for other discussion groups on the Internet, too. You can post questions on those discussions, but it's also very interesting to see what other people are asking. Book discussion groups often don't have as much traffic, so the topics tend to be more limited than those in these other groups. (Although I watch my P2P groups closely, so go there if you want me to answer.)
Finally, if you get stuck on an exercise or some other program you're working on, e-mail me at [email protected]. I won't solve the exercises for you but I'll try to clarify problems or give you the hints you need to solve them yourself.
Getting the Most out of the Book
This book provides a lot of tools that you can use to best match your learning style, but you have to use them. If you learn best by reading text, spend more time on the text. If you like step-by-step instructions, focus on the Try Its and their step-by-step instructions. If you learn best by watching and listening, focus on the screencasts.
Then, after you've finished a lesson, use the exercises to verify that you've mastered the material. Most of the lessons are fairly easy to just read through quickly. Unless you practice what you've learned, you can't be sure it's sticking, so plan to spend some time on the exercises. It would not be strange to spend half an hour reading the lesson and then several hours working through the Try It and exercises.
And don't be afraid to invent programs of your own. Just because an idea isn't in the book doesn't mean it wouldn't make good practice. Modify the programs you build for the exercises to find out what you can accomplish.
How This Book Is Structured
This book is divided into seven sections, each containing a series of short lessons. The lessons are generally arranged in order, with later lessons depending on earlier ones, so you should study the lessons more or less in order, at least through the first four sections. The lessons in sections V, VI, and VII cover slightly more specialized topics and you can study them in any order.
Many of the exercises are tagged with a topic as in [Games] or [WPF]. Those indicate a theme that you may find interesting. For example, the [Games] exercises involve techniques that you may find useful if you want to build game programs. The topics include:
● [WPF] – These ask you to use WPF. They are often harder than corresponding Windows Forms programs, but they sometimes produce better-looking results. (You also need to use WPF to build tablet-style and Windows Phone apps.)
● [Games] – These are generally amusing or demonstrate techniques that may be useful in building game programs.
● [SimpleEdit] – This is a simple word processing application that is built and enhanced over a sequence of exercises in several lessons.
● [Drawing] – These exercises make a program that draws lines and shapes.
● [Hard] – Exercises with this tag are generally harder than most of the other exercises so they may take some extra time. (I bet you guessed that!)
● [Advanced] – These exercises use more advanced techniques and may be harder.
● [Bonus] – These exercises extend the topic covered in the lesson and include extra instructions for performing a technique not covered in the main lesson.
Persistent Programs
Many of the exercises ask you to edit an earlier version of a program. Just copy the previous version into a new directory and modify it there. (The section “Copying Projects” in Lesson 1 explains how to do that.)
If you skip an exercise, you may later not have a version that you need to copy. In that case just download the version you need from the book's website.
For example, the instructions for Exercise 24-1 ask you to copy the program you built for Exercise 23-1. If you skipped that exercise, you can download the Lesson 23 material from the book's website and use the version that it contains.
The book's sections are:
● I: The Visual Studio IDE and Controls– These lessons explain how to use the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) and how to use the controls that make up a user interface. You need to study these lessons to get started.
● II: Variables and Calculations– These lessons deal with variables and calculations. They explain what variables are and how a program can use them to calculate results. They also explain how to debug programs.
● III: Program Statements– These lessons describe program statements and syntax. They explain
