Practicing and exploring

Test your knowledge and understanding by answering some questions, get some hands-on practice, and explore the topics covered in this chapter with deeper research.

Exercise 2.1 – Test your knowledge

To get the best answer to some of these questions, you will need to do your own research. I want you to "think outside the book" so I have deliberately not provided all the answers in the book.

I want to encourage you to get in the good habit of looking for help elsewhere, following the principle of "teach a person to fish."

What type would you choose for the following "numbers"?

1. A person's telephone number
2. A person's height
3. A person's age
4. A person's salary
5. A book's ISBN
6. A book's price
7. A book's shipping weight
8. A country's population
9. The number of stars in the universe
10. The number of employees in each of the small or medium businesses in the United Kingdom (up to about 50,000 employees per business)

Exercise 2.2 – Practice number sizes and ranges

Create a console application project named Exercise02 that outputs the number of bytes in memory that each of the following number types uses, and the minimum and maximum values they can have: sbyte, byte, short, ushort, int, uint, long, ulong, float, double, and decimal.

More Information: You can always read the documentation, available at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/base-types/composite-formatting for Composite Formatting to learn how to align text in a console application.

The result of running your console application should look something like the following screenshot:

Figure 2.10: The result of the console application

Exercise 2.3 – Explore topics

Use the following links to read more about the topics covered in this chapter:

• C# Keywords: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-reference/keywords/index
• Main() and command-line arguments (C# Programming Guide): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/main-and-command-args/
• Types (C# Programming Guide): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/types/
• Statements, Expressions, and Operators (C# Programming Guide): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/statements-expressions-operators/
• Strings (C# Programming Guide): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/strings/
• Nullable Types (C# Programming Guide): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/nullable-types/
• Nullable reference types: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/nullable-references
• Console Class: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.console