This book assumes that you have some programming familiarity: you<br>understand that a program is a collection of statements, the idea of a<br>subroutine/function/macro, control statements such as “if” and looping<br>constructs such as “while,” etc. However, you might have learned this in<br>many places, such as programming with a macro language or working<br>with a tool like Perl. As long as you’ve programmed to the point where you<br>feel comfortable with the basic ideas of programming, you’ll be able to<br>work through this book. Of course, the book will be easier for the C<br>programmers and more so for the C++ programmers, but don’t count<br>yourself out if you’re not experienced with those languages (but come<br>willing to work hard; also, the multimedia CD that accompanies this book<br>will bring you up to speed on the basic C syntax necessary to learn C#). I’ll<br>be introducing the concepts of object-oriented programming (OOP) and<br>C#’sbasic control mechanisms, so you’ll be exposed to those, and the first<br>exercises will involve the basic control-flow statements.<br>Although references will often be made to C and C++ language features,<br>these are not intended to be insider comments, but instead to help all<br>programmers put C# in perspective with those languages, from which,<br>after all, C# is descended. I will attempt to make these references simple<br>and to explain anything that I think a non- C/C++ programmer would not<br>be familiar with.