Learn and Practice LINQ & C# with LINQPad

After a much needed day off yesterday, I'm back at it today studying C# Fundamentals and LINQ (language integrated query). Thumbing through the pages of O'Reilly's C# 4.0 Pocket Reference by Joseph Albahari, I discovered that the author is actually the creator of a handy LINQ/C# scratchpad called LINQPad. 

During the second week of camp (seems like years ago, now!), one of our camp-mates, Danyal Mahmud told us about using LINQPad to practice writing LINQ queries. I didn't start using it right away because we were so busy learning new material. But now I wish I had, because not only is LINQPad great for LINQ, it's also great for learning and practicing C#, from a beginner level to advanced.

Here's why... 

Included in the Samples tab of the program are code snippets from C# 5.0 in a Nutshell, another highly rated book by Joseph Albahara. When you install LINQPad, you get snippets from Chapters 8, 9, 10 & 26. Then you can click "Download/import more samples...", and get even more samples from Nutshell, along with snippets from other books like C# in Depth & Asynchronous Functions in C# (I won't even pretend I know what those are... Yet!)

You can view, clone, edit & run these snippets right in the application without having to create new console apps in Visual Studio and you can practice LINQ directly on your own databases with the Add Connection feature. Starting out in C# and LINQ can be intimidating, and overwhelming at times. With tools and resources like these, however, the learning curve starts looking more like a hill than a mountain.

The Rubber Meets the Road

Fund.io Admin Dashboard

So, I'm in the 4th week here at Coder Camps. Time to post on the blog has become scarce, but we're moving forward on the Fund.io Admin Dashboard. Josh Thoyakulathu, my paired programming partner, and I have been working on a Flagged comments page that will be used by Admin users to approve or reject flagged comments from the front-end of the website.

The daily schedule we've adopted is:

• Stand-up meetings to coordinate what we've done and where we're going as a group
• Function writing practice
• Short, focused lectures
• Paired programming 

After that, we're on our own. I'm continuing to use the Pluralsight videos in addition to sites like Microsoft Developer Network & StackOverflow to fill in the gaps and as a goto for finding solutions to problems. Next up, learning how to create AJAX calls to populate our table on the fly. 

The deeper I get into this stuff, the more I realize how much actually goes on behind the scenes. Somewhere, behind all these magically delicious gadgets and gizmos of the web, are lines of code that someone wrote. My hat is off to these wizards. I hope they don't mind me standing on their shoulders.