Conclusion

If you have read the entire book and you've solved all the problems from the exercises and reached the present conclusion, congratulations! You've already made the first step in learning the profession of a programmer, but there is a long way to go until you become really good and make software writing your profession.

Developer Skills

Remember the four main groups of skills that each programmer must have in order to work in the industry:

• Skill #1 – writing the program code (20% of programmer's skills) – covered to a large degree by this book, but you must learn additional basic data structures, classes, functions, strings and other elements of code writing.
• Skill #2 – algorithmic thinking (30% of programmer's skills) – covered partially by this book and developed mostly by solving a large amount of diverse algorithmic problems.
• Skill #3 – fundamental understanding of the profession (25% of programmer's skills) – acquired for a few years in combination with learning and practice (reading books, watching video lessons, attending courses and mostly by writing diverse projects in various technological areas).
• Skill #4 – programming languages and software technologies (25% of programmer's skills) – acquired in a long period of time, by a lot of practice, consistent reading and writing projects. Such knowledge and skills quickly get outdated and need to be updated frequently. Good programmers are involved in studying new technologies every day.

This Book is Only the First Step!

The present book on programming basics is just the first step in building the skills of a programmer. If you were able to solve all problems, this means you have obtained valuable knowledge in the programming principles with C# on a basic level. You are about to start in-depth studying of programming, and develop your algorithmic thinking, and then add technological knowledge regarding the C# language and the .NET ecosystem (.NET Framework, .NET Core, Entity Framework, ASP.NET, etc.), front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and many other concepts, technologies and instruments for software development.

If you were not able to solve all problems or a large part of them, go back and solve them! Remember that becoming a programmer requires a lot of work and efforts. This profession is not for lazy people. There is no way to learn it, unless you seriously practice programming for years!

As we already explained, the first and basic skill of a programmer is to learn to write code with ease and pleasure. This is namely the mission of this book: to teach you how to code. We recommend you, besides reading the book, to enroll in the Software Developer program at SoftUni.

How to Proceed After This Book?

This book gives you solid foundations, thanks to which it will be easy for you to continue developing as programmers. If you wonder how to continue your development, you have the following possibilities:

• to study for a software developer at SoftUni and make programming your profession;
• to continue developing as a programmer in your own way, for example through self-training or via online lessons;
• to stay at coder level, without going more seriously into programming.