Coding With Flavio
What You Need:
Visual Studio Community 2015
This is an extremely powerful free IDE (integrated development environment) that will allow us to easily write code, build it, and debug it. Everything that you need for writing code in C# is included in this one package.
Unity
A fantastic game development engine that is currently used by many industry-level game developers and hobbyists alike. It is free and can make games ranging from simple to highly sophisticated. It primarily uses C# for scripting, but has a powerful drag-and-drop interface as well.
We will not be using Unity until we finish the C# Basics, so you can postpone this download until then.
Lesson FAQ:
What is an IDE and why do we need one?
An IDE (integrated development environment) is a powerful tool for software dev. You don't necessarily have to have one, but it helps immensely for larger projects. Furthermore, I believe it's even more instrumental for learning a new language, as we otherwise need to go though many painful steps before we can even start writing code. Even after that, it offers many things like Syntax Highlighting (think of it as spellcheck and grammar check for code) which will help you learn to code while avoiding common frustrations from early lessons.
I want to learn C# but I don't want to use Unity. Should I continue?
YES! Simply take the C# Basics (and Advanced C# if you'd like) and ignore the later Unity Basics lessons. The C# Basics and Advanced C# lessons are mutually exclusive from Unity, though Unity itself uses these concepts. However, all these lessons stand on their own as well, and can be applied to any other C# project. I will also teach many things that are not immediately applicable to Unity, such as Windows Forms, in the later lessons.