Hello. I'm trying to get a few opinions on the following. I have received a few so far. Thanks in advance:

Not sure if this is a silly question or not. I'm trying to relate it to technical support. I have been in the technical support field for many years and with thousands of technical articles written for problems we find - it's impossible to memorize all the technical articles. Even some of the information and troubleshooting procedures are impossible to memorize. Heck, we even use the documentation to help us with the easier questions/problems customers are having and we can't memorize the entire documentation of the product for supporting purposes.

C# is my first real language learned other than intro courses.

So for programming, while I'm learning c#, do I need to memorize everything I read including syntax? Do people actually memorize EVERY method and what it does as another example?

For example, currently right now I'm learning about properties. Creating the property within the class, using the property information to get and display the values, as well as learning how to extract the information at runtime (as if you didn't have access to the code of the original class). There are a LOT of methods and TYPES involved in this process. In addition, some of the methods have other types that are not even used in the particular examples I'm learning. For example: The Type class provides several methods and I'm just learning how to use the GetProperties Method. Or another example is using the DisplayPropertyInfo method from the MethodInfo class.

Thanks for any insight, so I can concentrate on memorizing what I really should be memorizing. I'm doing a lot of reading right now, seeing a lot of code examples and code explanations. Obviously, I'm familiar with the you don't use it, you lose it methodology. Just wondering how the CODE world and knowing and understanding programming concepts relates to the Technical Support World when it comes to memorizing.

Hell no! That's what Google and IntelliSense are for!

This post has been edited by JackOfAllTrades: 7 Oct, 2008 - 08:59 AM

You'll learn it all as you go. Naturally. Don't try to learn it all at once, your head will explode.

The Visual Studio environment will tell you what you're doing wrong. It will show you all the properties of an object, it will help remind you of syntax. The compiler will tell you if it looks right.

It's far easier to simply do something and figure it out from there. "There must be a way to do this" will be your catch phrase as you start writing programs. All the basic stuff has already been written, over and over again. Just look at this board. Don't let that discourage you, write your own stuff and then see what others did. If you don't know who to do a particular thing, look it up online. Then go back to your own program.

Not a chance. I'm always referring to MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/

It's silly, but I do try to memorize the syntax when going to the interview because I know they will ask me to write on the board although I know some main concepts in C# because of C++ course in college.

It's way more important to make sure you understand what each bit of code you wirte is doing (and why) rather than worrying about remembering each little bit of syntax.

That way you will find you have a very good understanding of whatever language you are learning, and the syntax will then come naturally.

I still have to look up trivial things that I should have learnt years ago!