Getting to Know Your Environment

Pop culture likes to market computer programmers as outsiders, lone wolves, or geeky hackers; people who possess extraordinary mental gifts for algorithmic thought, little social IQ, and the odd anarchic bent. While this isn’t the case, there is something to the idea that learning to code fundamentally changes the way you look at the world.

The good news is that your naturally curious mind already wants to see these kinds of patterns in the world, and you may even come to enjoy this new way of thinking. From the moment your eyes snap open in the morning to the last glimpse of your ceiling fan before you go to sleep, you’re unconsciously using analytical skills that directly translate to programming—you’re just missing the right language and syntax to map those life skills into code.

You know your age, right? That’s a variable. When you cross the street, I presume you look down the road in both directions before stepping off the curb like the rest of us. That’s evaluating different conditions, better known as control flow in programming terminology. When you look at a can of soda, you instinctively identify that it has certain properties, like shape, weight, and contents. That’s a class object! You get the idea.

With all that real-world experience at your fingertips, you’re more than ready to cross over into the realm of programming. To kick off your journey, you’ll need to know how to set up your development environment, work with the applications involved, and know exactly where to go when you need help.

To those ends, we’re going to begin by delving into the following C# topics:

• Getting started with Unity 2023
• Using C# with Unity
• Exploring the documentation

Let’s get started!