I know C-Sharp is new to many of you. Therefore, I want to provide a bit of a QuickStart guide on the language. This is where we dive a bit deeper into the technical jargon of programming. C-Sharp is an object oriented programming language developed by Microsoft. It is a variant of C, a very popular programming language used for decades. If you have programmed in another language before, such as C, C++, JavaScript or Java, the transition to C-Sharp will be an easy one. And many of the concepts I'll cover are available in most programming languages. Like I said before, if you're completely new to programming, I'm going to cover things quickly as this is not a full fledged programming course. But more of a quick start for those that have some programming experience, but may be new to C-Sharp. In any case, let's jump in. When learning a new programming language, first, realize that you're communicating with a computer. You must be very precise. Putting a comma in the wrong place or missing a semicolon will result in what they call a syntax error. Therefore, you must understand the syntax of the language, that is how the language is structured so the computer will understand it. Once you have this down, then you can learn basic commands, the ones used most frequently. I'm presenting many of these basic commands across this lecture. It's also helpful to get a good reference to look things up. Fortunately, there are many available online. I'll point you to a few good ones. Also, it's always helpful to see code examples. I'll be showing several in this lecture and in projects across the course. And last but not the least, practice. The more you program, the better you'll get at it. When you're learning any new programming language, it's traditional that the first script that you write is called HelloWorld. It is a script that simply outputs a HelloWorld message back to you. In C-Sharp, a Hello-World script could look like this. If you attach the script to a game object in your scene and then click play, it would output the HelloWorld message to the console window within the unity editor. The result would look something like this. You can bring up the console window by selecting window in the unity menu bar, then select general and then console. Moving forward, you can use this basic script by just replacing the contents of the start function to test any of the code snippets in the examples that follow. The LogWarning and LogError methods of the debug class allow you to output messages to the unity editor console window. The player will never see this information, but it's very useful for a simple debugging technique while working in the unity editor. Here are three more realistic examples of using Debug.Log. Here is the corresponding example output that you would see in the console window. Notice how we are combining a string with data stored in a variable name in the first two lines. The third line is using the floor method of the built in math f class to calculate the floor of a number. That is, it rounds the floating point number down to the nearest whole number. Okay. Now that we could do something in C-Sharp, let's build upon that. There are several important things to realize in C-Sharp. First, C-Sharp is case-sensitive. That is, you need to use the proper letter casing for things to work. So for example, Debug.Log with capital D and capital L is not the same thing as all lower-case debug.log. The one that works in unity is the first line. Semicolons ends a statement in C-Sharp, as you can see in the code above. You can have multiple statements on a line or you can have a statement that spans across multiple lines as shown here. It really doesn't matter in C-Sharp. However, most people only use one statement per line for human readability purposes. Speaking of readability when writing code, you often want to add English comments to describe what you're doing in the code to make it more readable for yourself and for others. Single line comments begin with //. While multiple line comments, begin with a /*, and then end with a */, as shown here. Anything that is included in the code, that is a comment, is completely ignored by the computer when the code is run. Once again, comments are only for us humans. With that said, it's always good to comment your code. [MUSIC]
