.NET Core, which is pronounced as dot net core and is, sometimes, written as dotnet core, is a fairly fresh programming platform from Microsoft that is set to dominate Microsoft software development stack. Therefore, if you are enthusiastic about programming and planning to start career in the industry, .NET Core is one of the hottest specialties that will guarantee you employment with good salaries for years to come.
So, how do you get started learning .NET Core, especially if you never had any prior programming experience?
Learning from free online resources might be feasible. There are plenty of them out there. However, as a beginner, you are very likely to just get overwhelmed with the information. You don’t know what you don’t know, so it will be difficult to know where to start and it will be easy to get lost and completely discouraged.
I am a self-taught programmer and I know what struggles beginners go through. This is why I have put together a structured course tailored specifically for those who have very little programming experience or no programming experience at all.
Introducing “.NET Core for absolute beginners” training course
The first section of the course introduces the student to .NET Core. First, it explains what .NET Core is and outlines all key benefits of knowing it. It also explains how to set up your environment and get ready for building your first application. This information provided for any mainstream operating systems, which includes Windows, Mac and Linux.
This is then followed by the core concept of C# programming language, which is the most popular language used by .NET Core developers. The section explains why C# is better language to learn than VB.NET or F#, which are also available on .NET Core. After this, the student is introduced to its basic syntax. The student will then proceed to write a basic .NET Core application and will be taught how to build and run it.
The next section of the course introduces the concepts of conditional logic and loops. Although the examples are given in C#, the concepts introduced in this section are applicable to any other programming language. The application that the student is instructed to write gradually grows in complexity throughout this section and starts to resemble some real-life applications.
As all languages used by .NET Core fall under the category of object oriented languages, the next section of the course introduces the student to the concept of object oriented programming. This is the most popular programming paradigm in the software development world, therefore, the knowledge of object oriented programming is essential in the software industry of today.
One thing that a programmer will do a lot of in their code throughout their career is get their code to perform various calculations. Therefore, the next section of the course teaches the user how to use operators in C# to perform those. By the end of the section, the user will build a command line-based calculator app.
When the application is run, it’s not the code that user wrote that gets executed. When the app is build, the code gets converted to a collection of CPU instructions and it is those that actually run. This is called compilation and this is the concept that is taught in the next section of the course. Also, the student is taught how to synchronize the code with the running application and observe what the code is doing in real time. This is a process known as debugging.
The final section of the course gives the student a well-defined direction of where to go next.
As well as the material presented in the course itself, each section provides a list of carefully selected further reading material that is the most relevant to the subject at hand. Most of those come from the official documentation provided by Microsoft.
Unlike many other courses, this course does not attempt to teach too many things at once. However, it does cover the most fundamental parts of .NET Core, so it is sufficient to turn someone with no prior knowledge of .NET Core into someone who has a solid foundation in the subject. Although, some further studying would be necessary enable such a student to become a self-sufficient programmer.
Where to enroll
If you feel like learning .NET Core is what you want to do, you can enroll on the course via the link below. You’ll find that some lectures are open for a free preview.