I have some background in Python and Bash (this is entirely self-taught and i think the easiest language from all). I know that C# is much different, propably this is why it is hard. I’ve been learning it for more than 4 months now, and the most impressive thing i can do with some luck is to write a console application that reads 2 values from the terminal, adds them together and prints out the result. Yes, seriously. The main problem is that there are not much usable resources to learn C#. For bash, there is Linux, a shit ton of distros, even BSD, MacOS and Solaris uses it. For python, there are games and qtile window manager. For C, there is dwm. I don’t know anything like these for C#, except Codingame, but that just goes straight to the deep waters and i have no idea what to do. Is my whole approach wrong? How am i supposed to learn C#? I’m seriously not the sharpest tool in the shed, but i have a pretty good understanding of hardware, networking, security, privacy. Programming is beyond me however, except for small basic scripts
You must log in or # to comment.
The heck you’re talking about? There’s a ton of free resources to learn the basics.
https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/csharp official Microsoft learning resources.
https://dotnettutorials.net/course/csharp-dot-net-tutorials/ for C# basics and .NET framework (which is backend standard).
For game engines you need specific tutorials in those engines.
C# was the first language I learned in school, there’s plenty of beginner resources for it on Youtube. You can also try some projects using Windows Form Applications (janky but fun) or the Unity game engine, which has tons of resources online.
Why you need or want to learn C#? I think depending on the answer we can find a good starting point on how to approach your learning because is not just about the language, also about the ecosystem.
Because it is required in my school. And we barely have any classes, even then, the teacher is not really good at teaching it. He thinks we will learn by copy-pasting it from the board. This is literally what we have to do in class. And for some reason, he is the principal
Do the other students feel the same way? It might be worth starting a study group amongst your peers to help one another out.
Have you reached out to your teacher? they should be able to either help you catch up or steer you towards resources that better suit your pace/ learning style.
Yes, they do but we are not a good community, they are not really helpful. The teacher is the principal. He barely has time to come to the lesson, i doubt he has the time and intrest to care about students who can’t understand what is going on. Plus he is not that approachable person, very strict and not that helpful
Ok, so if is for school, what is the context? Is a class about C#, about OOP, or programming languages, or creating a website or creating a videogame. I’ll try to cover different focuses.
C#, if is just about the language, I’d think is a bit strange, I feel that at school level you want to relate a programming language to a more fundamental concept that you can find in other languages as well, rather than sth this specific. Anyway, things like memory management: memory allocation, value/reference, garbage collection, or things like async/await, Tasks, LINQ, polymorphism, the different types and keywords and the .NET framework are important at this level.
C# is a multi paradigm language so you can implement stuff mainly in OOP, but also functional, imperative and others, I’m going to assume that the idea is to use it more as OOP, if you have used already OOP in Python you just need to find what are the features and constraints of C# around this compared with Python.
A console project may help you to understand these concepts, but at the end it will depend in what you want/need to learn to focus on what kind of project is better to implement for learning. If is just the concepts in OOP in C# any simple project can help you on that, for instance you can use a Code Kata and you can add specific requirements about covering OOP concepts so you force you to learn and practice that, even if is over engineered.
If your plan is more related to a project implementation, that’s a different story, because now you have to consider not just the building process, but also the deployment process, so not just about the language, and in this it matter less some specific stuff about the language and more about how to implement some stuff using already libraries, so is more about putting things together having in mind good practices, and also how you pack the binaries and distribute them. Other stuff, where the app will run, how do you monitor your app while is running, do you need persistence? Do you need logging, do you need security, etc.
Starting with Visual Studio (not code) helps a ton. Make a simple winforms application with a button and some labels and you will start to see how it ‘starts up’ from program.cs to your form.
I did it once but needed a lot of assistance and it was very confusing
An IDE with auto-complete would help a lot.
I have a Python background and I’m learning C# right now. Unity development is done in C# if your interested in games or 3D applications. There’s a ton of resources for that kind of think out there and I find its a fun context to learn in. I’ve also had decent results recreating tutorials written for other languages using LLMs. Just start with step 1 as a premise and state the overall goal, then ask for incremental changes at each step an ask questions and for alternate solutions. Just watch out for those hallucinations.
Tim Corey on YouTube has excellent beginner C# material. I would start there.
- Make a text adventure game that runs in the console.
- Tic tac toe in the console.
Then if you want to go for a GUI web app with react use “dotnet new react” and create a to-do list with a client/server setup.
If you want to learn to make games you could make a tic tac toe again but with a GUI in Godot.
Once that’s done make tetris.
You research what you need right before you need it and use it immediately so it sticks better. You’ll need to get comfy with typing systems and I recommend using an IDE like Rider or Visual Studio to program it since they help out a lot.
You think Bash is the easiest language? I have to Google the syntax every time i need to write and IF statement!
Thisss, it’s atrocious
There’s a few languages I come back to after a while to fix something and have to consult their reference manual / docs. But bash is the only one where that’s necessary just to read back my own code. Like [[ -z ${ARG} ]]? Wtf is -z doing here. Wtf kind of syntax is that.
Next time I think oh this could be automated with a little bash scrip I’m going to investigate one of those compiles-to-bash languages.
it’s the second language that comes to mind when I think of the word “footgun”, right after old c++
I learned C# from the Aurora guide book I picked up with Neverwinter Nights back in the day.
What is aurora and what is this guide book?
Aurora is the engine Neverwinter Nights ran on. The scripting system was driven by C#. The guidebook was the official “strategy guide” but for the toolset, not the game itself.
I heard Watch Dogs uses C# too. Should i start modding these games, with mods that add additional logic? I only have experience with localization and texture mods
Depends how you learn. Being mindful of what your goal is helps. C# can be used for console apps, it can also be used to make ASP.Net websites, further afield you can program the Unity games engine with C#. Each of these will have “absolute beginner most basic first steps” type tutorials out there. They’ll all have some similarity as you’ll need to just learn the C# syntax one way out another, but it miles easier doing this if you’re vaguely interested in the types of apps you’re heading towards.
If all else fails, message me, I was there once, about 20 years ago…
one of the most popular languages, used in one of the most popular game engines, has no learning resources?
Press X to doubt
Yeah but then you have to learn MATH and I’m not doing that.
Start with the goal to create something, be it a console app, website, web api, or game. It’s hard to just study a language abstractly and learn it. Use the Microsoft Learn documentation as reference, and look for open source .NET projects on GitHub to get different perspectives on how to build things with .NET. There is a free course on freecodecamp that will get you started by building an app, and I believe it was done in partnership with Microsoft
- Start writing a small game in Godot using GDScript (basically Python)
- Use the Godot docs to read about C# alternatives to GDScript as you go, compare them and see how they differ
- Translate bit by bit of your game to C# using the docs
- Congrats, you have written a game in C#
Don’t learn a language unless you need to use it for something.
That’s why you’re finding it hard. If you needed to program a game, decided on Unity, and had a specific thing to do, it would be easy to figure out how to do that in C#.
