Before writing a program to solve a problem, you should have a thorough understanding of the problem and a carefully planned approach to solving it. When writing a program, you also should understand the available building blocks and employ proven program-construction techniques. In this chapter and the next, we discuss these issues in presenting the theory and principles of structured programming. The concepts presented here are crucial in building classes and manipulating objects. We discuss C#’s if statement in additional detail and introduce the if…else and while statements—all of these building blocks allow you to specify the logic required for methods and properties to perform their tasks. We also introduce the compound assignment operators and the increment and decrement operators. Finally, we discuss additional details of C#’s simple types.