This chapter served as a rudimentary introduction to C#. It provided a means of familiarizing you with basic C# syntax. Because of C#’s similarity to C++-style languages, much of this chapter’s content might not have been new material to you. However, C# and managed code do have some distinct characteristics, such as compilation down to CIL. Although it is not unique, another key characteristic of C# is its full support for object-oriented programming. Even tasks such as reading and writing data to the console are object oriented. Object orientation is foundational to C#, as you will see throughout this book.

The next chapter examines the fundamental data types that are part of the C# language and discusses how you can use these data types with operands to form expressions.