Introduction   

Over the past 25 years I ’ ve written 15 books on various programming topics. You might wonder why so many  . . .  Didn ’ t I get it right the first time? Well, no, I didn ’ t  . . .  not really. When I wrote my first book over 25 years ago, object - oriented programming (OOP) was obscure at best and unknown to most. Like so many others, I had to go through the OOP learning process before I could appreciate what OOP was all about. I have a feeling that there are a lot of people out there who still feel that way.  Each time I teach a programming class, I learn new and better ways to explain things. When I look out across a classroom filled with students and it looks like a still - life painting, it ’ s time to back off, retool, and try a different approach to whatever concept it is I ’ m trying to teach. Every class I ’ ve taught has offered new perspectives on how I teach and how students learn. Changing my examples and the techniques I use to teach programming concepts is one of the reasons I came back to teaching after so many years away  . . .  I missed the learning experience.

A number of the books I wrote were concerned with languages other than C#, but that too provides for an enriching experience for me as an instructor. The strengths and weaknesses of a language can be appreciated only if you ’ ve grappled with some other less - than - perfect languages. The fact that programming languages continue to evolve supports the conclusion that I ’ m not the only one who is still learning. After all this time, the one thing that I have learned with absolute certainty is that whatever I know today will likely be out of date tomorrow.