E-Books: C# Yellow Book by Rob Miles Author
A look at C#
There are literally hundreds of programming languages around, you will need to know at least 3!
We are going to learn a language called C# (pronounced C sharp). If you ever make the mistake of calling the language C hash you will show your ignorance straight away! C# is a very flexible and powerful programming language with an interesting history. It was developed by Microsoft Corporation for a variety of reasons, some technical, some political and others marketing.
C# bears a strong resemblance to the C++ and Java programming languages, having borrowed (or improved) features provided by these languages. The origins of both Java and C++ can be traced back to a language called C, which is a highly dangerous and entertaining language which was invented in the early 1970s. C is famous as the language the UNIX operating system was written in, and was specially designed for this.
Dangerous C
I referred to C as a dangerous language. So what do I mean by that? Consider the chain saw. If I, Rob Miles, want to use a chain saw I will hire one from a shop. As I am not an experienced chain saw user I would expect it to come with lots of built in safety features such as guards and automatic cut outs. These will make me much safer with the thing but will probably limit the usefulness of the tool, i.e. because of all the safety stuff I might not be able to cut down certain kinds of tree. If I was a real lumberjack I would go out and buy a professional chain saw which has no safety features whatsoever but can be used to cut down most anything. If I make a mistake with the professional tool I could quite easily lose my leg, something the amateur machine would not let happen.
In programming terms this means is that C lacks some safety features provided by other programming languages. This makes the language much more flexible. However, if I do something stupid C will not stop me, so I have a much greater chance of crashing the computer with a C program than I do with a safer language.
Safe C#
The C# language attempts to get the best of both worlds in this respect. A C# program can contain managed or unmanaged parts. The managed code is fussed over by the system which runs it. This makes sure that it is hard (but probably not impossible) to crash your computer running managed code. However, all this fussing comes at a price, causing your programs to run more slowly. To get the maximum possible performance, and enable direct access to parts of the underlying computer system, you can mark your programs as unmanaged. An unmanaged program goes faster, but if it crashes it is capable of taking the computer with it. Switching to unmanaged mode is analogous to removing the guard from your new chainsaw because it gets in the way.
C# and Objects
The C# language is object oriented. Objects are an organisational mechanism which let you break your program down into sensible chunks, each of which is in charge of part of the overall system. Object Oriented Design makes large projects much easier to design, test and extend. It also lets you create programs which can have a high degree of reliability and stability. I am very keen on object oriented programming, but I am not going to tell you much about it just yet. This is not because I don't know much about it (honest) but because I believe that there are some very fundamental programming issues which need to be addressed before we make use of objects in our programs. The use of objects is as much about design as programming, and we have to know how to program before we can design larger systems. >>>>>
For Download:
