Properties vs fields in C Sharp (C#) - Hands-On Comparison

Properties vs fields

📖 Scenario: Imagine you are creating a simple program to manage a book's information. You want to store the book's title and control how it is accessed and changed.

🎯 Goal: You will create a class with a field and a property, then see how to use them to get and set the book's title.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a class called Book with a private field called _title of type string

Add a public property called Title with get and set accessors to control access to _title

Create an instance of Book and set the Title property

Print the value of the Title property

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Properties help control how data inside objects is accessed and changed, which is important for keeping data safe and consistent in real programs.

💼 Career

Understanding properties and fields is essential for writing clean, maintainable code in C# and many other object-oriented languages.

1

Create the Book class with a private field

Create a class called Book with a private field named _title of type string.

C Sharp (C#)

class Book
{
    // Your code here
}

Need a hint?

Use private string _title; inside the class to create the field.

2

Add a public property to access the field

Inside the Book class, add a public property called Title with get and set accessors that read from and write to the private field _title.

C Sharp (C#)

class Book
{
    private string _title;
    
    // Add the Title property below
    // Your code here
}

Need a hint?

The property should have a get that returns _title and a set that assigns value to _title.

3

Create a Book object and set the Title property

Create an instance of the Book class named myBook and set its Title property to "C# Basics".

C Sharp (C#)

class Book
{
    private string _title;
    
    public string Title
    {
        get { return _title; }
        set { _title = value; }
    }
}

// Create myBook and set Title
// Your code here

Need a hint?

Use new Book() to create the object and assign the title with myBook.Title = "C# Basics";.

4

Print the Title property value

Write a line to print the value of myBook.Title to the console.

C Sharp (C#)

class Book
{
    private string _title;
    
    public string Title
    {
        get { return _title; }
        set { _title = value; }
    }
}

Book myBook = new Book();
myBook.Title = "C# Basics";

// Print the title
// Your code here

Need a hint?

Use Console.WriteLine(myBook.Title); inside the Main method to print the title.