Summary

In this chapter, you've spent some time expanding your current knowledge of variables and filling in some of the blanks from earlier on. Perhaps the most important topic covered in this chapter is type conversion, because this is one that will come back and haunt you throughout this book. Getting a sound grasp of the concepts involved now will make things a lot easier later!

You've also seen a few more variable types that you can use to help you to store data in a more developer-friendly way. You've seen how enumerations can make your code much more readable with easily discernable values, how structs can be used to combine multiple related data elements in one place, and how you can group similar data together in arrays. You see all of these types used many times throughout the rest of this book.

Finally, you looked at string manipulation, discussing some of the basic techniques and principles involved. There are many individual string commands available here, and you only examined a few, but you also saw how you can look at the available commands in VS. Using this technique, you can have some fun trying things out. At least one of the examples below can be solved using one or more string commands you haven't seen yet, but I'm not telling you which!

In this chapter, you extended your knowledge of variables to cover:

• Type conversions

• Enumerations

• Structs

• Arrays

• String manipulation