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Educators have known for many years that different people use different learning styles most effectively. Different students may learn best by:

● Reading a textbook

● Looking at nonwritten material such as pictures and graphs

● Listening to an instructor lecture

● Watching someone demonstrate techniques

● Doing exercises and examples

(Personally, I learn best by watching and doing.)

Good instructors try to incorporate material that helps students with all of these learning styles. Combining text, lecture, demonstration, discussion, and exercises lets every student pick up as much as possible using whichever methods work best.

Like a good instructor, this book uses materials that address each learning style. It uses text and figures to help visual learners, screencasts that provide visual demonstrations and auditory instruction, step-by-step instructions to help you do it yourself, and exercises for further study.

The book is divided into small, bite-sized lessons that begin with a discussion of a particular concept or technique, complete with figures, notes, tips, and other standard fare for instructional books. The lessons are short and tightly focused on a single task so you can finish each one in a single sitting. You shouldn't need to stop in the middle of a lesson and leave concepts half-learned (at least if you turn off your phone).

NOTE

The “24-Hour” in the title means the book is available to train you 24 hours per day, not that you should be able to read then entire book in 24 hours. Unless you just skim the text and skip all of the Try Its and exercises, I'd be surprised if anyone could work through the whole thing in 24 hours.

After describing the main concept, the lesson includes a Try It section that invites you to perform a programming exercise to solidify the lesson's ideas.

The Try It has several subsections. Lesson Requirements describes the exercise so you know what should happen. Hints gives pointers about possible confusing aspects of the problem, if they're needed. Step-by-Step provides a numbered series of steps that show how to solve the problem.

A screencast on the accompanying DVD shows me working through the Try It problem. Additional commentary at the end of the screencast highlights extensions of the lesson's main concepts.

After the Try It's Step-by-Step section, the lesson concludes with extra exercises that you can solve for further practice and to expand the lesson's main ideas. Some of the exercises extend the material in the main lesson, so I recommend that you at least skim the exercises and ask yourself if you think you could do them. Solutions to the Try Its and all of the exercises are available for download on the book's website. Additional screencasts show how to work through many of the exercises.

Websites

To find the book's web page, go to www.wrox.com/go/csharp24hourtrainer2e. There you can find solutions to all of the Try Its and exercises, plus some additional resources. You can view the screencasts at www.wrox.com/go/csharp24hourtrainer2evideos.

The one thing that a good classroom experience has that this book doesn't is direct interaction. You can't shout questions at the instructor, work in a team with fellow students, and discuss exercises with other students in the campus coffee house.

Although the book itself can't help here, you can do at least three things to get this kind of interaction. First, join the Wrox P2P (peer-to-peer) discussion forum for this book. As the section “P2P.WROX.COM” later in this lesson says, you can join the discussion forum to post questions, provide answers, see what other readers are doing with the book's material, and generally keep tabs on book-related topics.

You can also sign up for other discussion groups on the Internet, too. You can post questions on those discussions, but it's also very interesting to see what other people are asking. Book discussion groups often don't have as much traffic, so the topics tend to be more limited than those in these other groups. (Although I watch my P2P groups closely, so go there if you want me to answer.)

Finally, if you get stuck on an exercise or some other program you're working on, e-mail me at RodStephens@CSharpHelper.com. I won't solve the exercises for you but I'll try to clarify problems or give you the hints you need to solve them yourself.

Getting the Most out of the Book

This book provides a lot of tools that you can use to best match your learning style, but you have to use them. If you learn best by reading text, spend more time on the text. If you like step-by-step instructions, focus on the Try Its and their step-by-step instructions. If you learn best by watching and listening, focus on the screencasts.

Then, after you've finished a lesson, use the exercises to verify that you've mastered the material. Most of the lessons are fairly easy to just read through quickly. Unless you practice what you've learned, you can't be sure it's sticking, so plan to spend some time on the exercises. It would not be strange to spend half an hour reading the lesson and then several hours working through the Try It and exercises.

And don't be afraid to invent programs of your own. Just because an idea isn't in the book doesn't mean it wouldn't make good practice. Modify the programs you build for the exercises to find out what you can accomplish.