Web technologies are developing extremely fast. Websites these days are faster, more efficient, better looking and provide great user experience. When starting to learn web development, it’s easy to get tempted by all the hype of the latest frameworks. I started with Angular myself. I loved it from the moment I wrote my first component.

But I quickly realised if I wanted to deal with data in the capacity I wanted, I would need to learn a back-end language. I took an approach that I find less than ideal. I dove into a bunch of tutorials about how to build full-stack apps. That made it very difficult for me to understand back-end properly. I wish I knew there was a better approach.

Now I find it much more effective to build Console Apps to learn back-end. And the reason is simple: Focus. You can dedicate your full attention to your back-end language if you don’t have to worry about all the complexities of presenting data to the user in a beautiful way.

That’s why I decided to make the first part of this program purely focused on Console Apps, without any front-end distractions. These apps will help progressively teach you: data types; basic control flow and syntax; dealing with databases; creating and calling APIs; Entity Framework; Repository Pattern and Unit Testing. As you can see there’s already a lot to keep you busy.

That doesn’t mean you won’t have an user interface. But instead of the website, you’ll be interacting with the user via the console line. You’ll still need to handle validation, basic presentation and all sorts of errors to provide a good user experience. And this knowledge will definitely transfer when you start creating full-stack apps.

I know we all want to create fancy things as soon as possible. Even when I was creating this library of console apps, I was looking forward to going back to the latest web technologies, Maui, Blazor, Angular, Ionic, React, they are beautiful! But without a solid back-end foundation we’re very limited. The competition for a job is tough out there. You need to stack the deck in your favour. And it starts here, writing simple, clean, effective console programs. Now let’s start