Hi, I hope everyone is having a blessed day.
I am very new to C# (and programming, in general), having coded for a bit over a month and a half with it. Tutorial hell is where I’ve found myself and I gave myself a week or two to catch a breath and get things into perspective.


Can anyone comprehensively explain to me what my path ought to be? I understand that frameworks are what make languages so powerful, but I have no clue which to get on. MVC, Entity Framework, APS.NET Core, .NET Core, Dapper (If I’m not mistaken), or any others that I’ve missed? Xaml, Xamarin, Web Forms, and the like? Is Blazor worth investing time in? What are the pros and cons for the abovementioned technologies and frameworks?
I’m stuck, so if anyone could take the time out of their day to enlighten me on these points, I would be very grateful. Thanks and cheers, mates.
Iam a noob too but the link on the right side of the sub pointed me to this wonderful video that explained a lot for me, check it out https://youtu.be/hYbe6sFYBDY?list=PLdo4fOcmZ0oWoazjhXQzBKMrFuArxpW80.
Thanks for the person who put the useful Links there – helped me a lot !
Asking questions like this expect zero answers primarily because this question has been asked multiple times. Foundational understanding is where it’s at because like all languages, there is a bedrock beneath it all and if you can’t figure out how it all works syntactically then expect to run around anxiously in circles.
To learn something, you need to not ask questions on forums about where to start because the answer is obvious. But, I will tell you a secret, a secret that everyone else will agree on. You need a PC/Laptop, a book on programming basics whether its logic or something as simple as C#, C, C++, Python(scripting) and the ambition to learn something, regardless of which language it is. If you can’t read the tutorials online, then what good is a book going to do you? If reading is a problem, then you just need to go to school and pay someone to show you.
I know I sound kind of dickish saying all this, but its the truth, only because of how many times the questions gets asked daily, regardless of what site you got to. My first book was
Practical C++ Programming, 2nd Edition
Then I moved to
Programming C#
and Then
Programming Python, 4th Edition
and then I watched Mosh Hamdani Videos from YouTube and Udemy. Spent most of my time in Code Project when I had too many bugs I couldn’t fix. Spent some time in Reddit asking questions but there are a lot of easy questions dodged and toxic people (u/bautin response as an example). Then pick out Streams on the Science channel of Twitch and learn from them.
But these are my preferences and anyone else can differ, that is fine. You just need to sit down and read something, because knowledge doesn’t come on a whim, you won’t have it tomorrow or a week from now. So stop wasting time in places like reddit looking for dead answers. Not trying to sound dickish. Better if you just sign up for community college and learn that way to build your foundation.
The issue is that I didn’t ask where I’m supposed to begin. I already did start, I’m learning on Pluralsight and supplementing it with a book on C#. I only asked what the path as far as the above-listed frameworks and technologies are concerned. I understand completely that I might be able to find what exactly ASP.NET is used for and whether I can make a website with it on other forums, but I was trying to see whether anyone on here, seeing as this is a community dedicated to C#, could list each and everyone of them in an all-embracing, thorough fashion, so that I can have them right here.


I wouldn’t say that your dickish, but I can’t go to college for a variety of reasons, so I’m on here asking random and, more often than not, rude people to explain certain points that I can’t wrap my head around. I really am sorry if this isn’t the right place for these kinds of questions, but if there were a thread somewhere on this topic that is as inclusive as I hoped this one would turn out, I wouldn’t be here. Do excuse me if I, myself, came out as dickish. Thanks for the suggestions and listing your experience.
It’s not the fact that it’s been asked so many times, it’s the fact that it’s just so incredibly vague it’s hardly even a question.
The correct answer to “Can anyone comprehensively explain to me what my path ought to be?” is “No”.
No one can. And he’s expecting to essentially be told the pros and cons of MVC, Entity Framework, .Net Core, what they all mean and how they relate when all he’s told us is that he’s spent a month and a half on this and can’t get through tutorials.
So excuse me if I’m terse with actual toxic people. Because that’s what he his. All his please and thanks and cheers are to disguise the fact that he’s looking for people to do the heavy lifting for him. He wants someone else to learn it for him somehow and just come in and start doing things. As if there were a magic phrase we could say that could make someone know how to program.
Side note: Squirrel book is one of my favorites.
You’re completely delusional if you think you’re just going to pick up a few frameworks with barely 2 months of programming experience. Go back to learning how to program, learn C#, learn OO and functional concepts, learn data structures and algorithms, learn how compilers work (at a basic level) and learn other core programming concepts such as recursion, threading, networking, events, etc from online courses such as Khan Academy or other online coding courses. Once you’ve done all this, ONLY THEN are you ready to start learning frameworks. The reason for this is that any framework is going to use all these basic concepts to build something more complex, and if you don’t have that basic understanding down then you have no chance of learning the more complex ideas in the framework.
Also, you’ve pulled a list of random frameworks out and expect an expert opinion on them all which is ridiculous. The question you need to ask yourself is, what do YOU want to do? Pick a programming sub-area that you like, research that, come up with a program you want to make, then find ONE framework that will help you along that path and start to learn that. There is no way you’re going to just learn multiple frameworks at once, especially since you’re a beginner programmer. At this stage increasing your foundational programming knowledge is your best bet if you want to actually get into programming and make anything useful.
What kind of programming do you want to do? What are your goals? A lot of the things you listed aren’t frameworks. Do you mean web frameworks? Client side, server side?
Web applications, RESTful APIs, and such is where my head is at.
OK. What do you want to do?
Start there.
Can anyone comprehensively explain to me what my path ought to be?
No.
Im going to use this post so I dont have to make my own. Any book recommendations and online courses? I am trying to build an Online store with NopCommerce and I would love some Csharp help.
C# devs
null reference exceptions

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