This is a free tutorial to help beginning programmers get up to speed using Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Express. To get the most from this tutorial, you might want to start at the beginning. The Complete Table of Contents for this course can be found on the first page of part 1: A "From the Ground Up" Tutorial.
We briefly discussed arrays in part 2 of the tutorial. But there's so much more to collections. In fact, much of data processing and the real world is centered around the idea that things occur in collections and you can simplify your life by working with them that way. Think of how much harder it would be to shop if you couldn't buy "a dozen eggs" or a "bag of oranges". If every egg was sold individually and might be anywhere in the store ... well ... shopping would be a lot harder. Similarly, most files are just collections of records that "look" just like one another. Databases are built of tuples or rows with identical fields in them. And collections play a key role inside programs too. The ability to program with collections of things is one of the key skills that must be mastered. On the next page, we consider collections in detail.
