Summary

And that's a wrap on the basics of working with data! Congratulations on making it through this monster chapter intact. Data in any programming context is a big topic, so take everything you've learned in this chapter as a jumping-off point.

You already know how to navigate the filesystem, and create, read, update, and delete files. You also learned how to effectively work with text, XML, and JSON data formats, as well as data streams. And you know how to take an entire object's state and serialize or deserialize it into both XML and JSON. All in all, learning these skills was no small feat. Don't forget to review and revisit this chapter more than once; there's a lot here that might not become second nature on the first run-through.

In the next chapter, we'll discuss the basics of generic programming, get a little hands-on experience with delegates and events, and wrap up with an overview of exception handling.