OOP confusion - Tower tower = new Tower ()

OOP is a very confusing part of programming.

I will try to explain it my best. Reply if you don't understand a particular part.

OOP is the style of writing classes in programming. Classes can be sometimes referred as objects because they can model real-world objects. In fact, the word "class" is short for "classify".

Think of a class as a cookie cutter. You can make instances—or copies—of the cookie cutter by stamping out a cookie. All of the cookies have things in common, like shape. However, the cookies don't have to be exactly the same. For example, one cookie can be green, and another red. (Yay, Christmas cookies! )

Here's another example. Think of a Car class. It might have a couple methods, or actions it can do. If I made that class, I'd probably put Drive() and Stop() methods, because most cars can drive and stop. Of course, you can put as many methods as you want. Maybe you'll put a Beep() method. Classes also have what is called properties. They aren't actions. They are more of like variables, because they can hold values. Our Car class may have color and topSpeed properties. Just like methods, you can have as many properties as you want.

In fact, all of the built-in things you've been using, like strings, are classes behind the hood. You make a new copy (instance) of the string class by wrapping text in quotes. They are unique because they can have different content, but they all have the same methods, like Split() and SubString(). They also all have the same properties, like Length.

Now that you're sort of familiar with classes, let's look at this line of code:

Tower tower = new Tower();

I will break it up step-by-step.

1. The first Tower in the line of code is the type of the variable. With strings, you would write string. With integers, you would write int, as so on. We still have to specify the type, which is the name of our class. The name of our class is Tower, so that's why that is there.
2. The second tower is the name of the variable. You can call this whatever you want, but it is conventional to have the name of the variable to be the name of the class lowercased.
3. The equal sign.
4. The new keyword. You use this to tell C# that you are going to make a instance.
5. The final Tower() on the line. This is where the magic is. This is the class that you are going to instantiate, and you may put data between the () if the class's constructor excepts parameters.

Does this help?

Happy coding!

Hope this helps

~Alex