Name: HOW TO PROGRAM - Getting Started!
Uploaded: 2026-03-23T10:20:16.000Z
Duration: 10 min 36 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

If you want to learn how to program but don't know where to start, this video should help point you in the right direction.

Modal verbs - A2

The world of programming can be a large and confusing place, but let's try and break it down.

To-infinitive

I find that lots of people who have never tried to program before think of it as one skill.

Being a programmer means how to do one thing.

However, the truth is pretty far from that.

There are many different programming languages and ways to program.

So this brings us to the first decision an aspiring programmer has to make.

There are a lot of languages to choose from, and each have their own strengths and weaknesses.

But most importantly, what language is right for you is going to completely depend on what you want to make.

For this series, I've chosen to go with C#.

Now, some of you might know that I'm a bit biased here.

After all, our entire YouTube channel is built around game development,

and the most popular game engine today, Unity, uses C# as its programming language.

But I do believe that C# is a great starting point for most developers.

This is not because it does everything perfectly.

No language does, but because of its diversity.

You see, C# is a widely used programming language.

It can be used to develop for mobile, PC, Mac, and even the web.

And if you want to get into game development, you can get started with Unity right away.

It's also based on C, which makes it really similar to other popular languages like C, C++, and

So if you later want to pick up another programming language, chances are that the transition won't be too difficult.

So in this short series, you will learn how to get started programming in C# and make your first programs.

The videos are going to focus on the absolute basics, so whether you want to make video games or web apps, you should be able to apply everything right away.

But before we get coding, this video is sponsored by Jason Wyman.

Sometimes when learning new skills like coding, it can be hard to find the motivation to learn by yourself.

In this case, joining a course alongside other students and with live help from a teacher can be a better choice.

Jason has made an awesome course on game architecture, which will teach you how to write clean and proper game code.

You'll have access to live help from Jason himself and a Discord channel where you can chat with your fellow students.

This will also give you access to the Game Dev Mastery course, which will teach you how to create a variety of game types in Unity.

So make your first game by signing up now.

Simply click the link in the description.

Now, once we've chosen the language we want to write in, we need to pick a code editor.

Many modern code editors will not only allow us to write code,

but also help with debugging and building our program.

You'll see some of these referred to as an IDE or Integrated Development Environment,

but don't let that scary title throw you off.

Of course, there are a lot of code editors to choose from,

and most of the time it's a matter of personal preference.

In this series, we're going to be using Visual Studio Code.

VS Code is Microsoft's lightweight code editor.

It's great because it can be used to program in almost any language.

It's multi-platform, open source, and it's 100% free.

Now, in this series, we're going to be creating a console application.

If you don't know what that is, here's one.

I agree with you that it does not look very appealing,

but it's great for learning how to program since it allows us to focus on the language itself without too many distractions.

But creating any kind of software completely from scratch is a huge challenge.

Instead, we normally use what is called a framework.

For now, you can think of a framework like a toolbox with a bunch of tools inside that will help you accomplish your job better and faster.

It's kind of the foundation that we build our program on top of.

and it can be used to create pretty much any kind of application.

So don't worry, you don't need to understand exactly what a framework is, just know that we need one for now.

And with that explanation in mind, let's get .NET and VS Code set up and run our first program.

So the first thing that we want to do is install the .NET core.

I'll of course have a link to this in the description.

Simply follow that link, select your platform, and hit install.

Then simply follow the installation instructions that you see on the screen.

Once you're done, we can simply hit close.

And next up, we want to install Visual Studio Code.

Again, I'll of course have a link for this in the description.

Simply download and follow the installation screen.

And once it's done, we can go ahead and open up Visual Studio Code.

Now, VS Code by default is really lightweight,

and it doesn't have the necessary tools for us to start writing in C#.

Instead, we need to install this as an extension.

So let's go to the bottom icon in the left-hand side,

and here we can go ahead and search for C#.

Let's select the first one, as we can see, C# by Microsoft,

and let's simply go ahead and hit install.

And once it's finished, we are ready to start writing C#.

However, there are actually a lot of really cool extensions available here.

One that I personally like is the VS Code icons.

So I'm going to search for icons here and select the VS Code icons and install it.

It then prompts me to select it as an icon theme here, which I'm going to do.

And all this does is just add some nice user-friendly icons to all of our files.

And with that, we can go ahead and close down this page and go to the top icon here.

And we are now ready to create our first project.

So to do that, let's go to our desktop here, and

let's create a folder that is going to store our project.

And right now, this is of course completely empty.

So let's go ahead and fill this up with a project.

We navigate to the my awesome program folder and hit select.

And as we can see, it's now opened up in VS Code,

but of course it's still completely empty.