Thnks for your input. Its been a frustrating 10 months of trying to learn from notepad etc. I downloaded books. the book by John sharp is pretty good but buy third or fourth chapter things change drastically. There are at least 4 other books ( on C# ) I stopped half way as I realised that the book should have started the other way around when it came to methods and classes. I use visual c# 2008 EE and want to avoid using eg notepad which will force use of a long continuation of code? if you have the above book, look at chapter 2 primitive data types example. this code is very short and works well while the next example of expressions, its even more simpler but code layout changed. As each chapter progress, the method ways change. From your experience, what is the best way to use method syntax? Would you know if there is any proper syllabus on visual c# 2008 online? Thanks for all your help! :-)