 Hey everybody, this is Brian. This is your fourth video on Visual Basic. Go ahead, dive right in and select New Project. This time, choose Console Window. Console Window is a very basic application. There, it's a plain black window with nothing in it. The Caps Lock must be on. So, just type the word Console, and type the word Read Line, and you can also just select using the up arrow and down arrow. And then hit Tab when you find the one you want. That'll save you some typing. Press F5 after you save your work. And you see this is our Console Window, and there's nothing in it. Console Window is a command line, it's a DOS prompt sort of thing. It's just a plain black window. This is what computers looked like long before you had buttons and menus. The reason why we're doing this is I don't want you to become distracted with menus and buttons and shiny objects. I want you to just focus on learning how to write code. So the topic for today is variables. Type DIM, stands for Dimension. Don't ask me why, it's a holdover from the legacy VB days. It's how they used to declare arrays, but anyways, it's DIM, and type Name, and then space as, and you notice it prompts you if your only option is as, and then string. Now what is a string? A string represents text as a series of unicode characters. What does that mean? It just means it's got letters in it. We can have letters or numbers, but it's a sentence. And then to assign your variable, you say the variable name and this case name equals, and then because this is a string it must be in quotes, my name. And you can actually substitute my name with whatever your name happens to be. So for review, you're declaring a variable name name as a string which is text, and then you're assigning that variable with my name, whatever your name may be. Now type console. And this type, type write line, and then name. Save your work, F5. Now when you run it, it should say my name. Now if it literally says my name, that means you're not paying attention when I'm saying you're supposed to enter your name. So rewind the video, go back enter your name. I'm just kidding. But you can see what's going on here. We are creating something called a variable. A variable is something that'll change. I can't emphasize that enough. People when they first start programming get confused, they get intimidated. All you need to know is a variable will change. And then you're assigning that variable to some data. Let's make a simple application here. Let's get rid of that. We'll say console. Write line, please enter your name. And then name equals console.readline Now when you go over readline, you notice how IntelliSense says public shared function readline as string. What does all that mean? Okay. Public means that it's publicly available. Let me give IntelliSense back here. Shared function, a function means it returns something. In this case, it's returning a string. You know what a string is because we just covered that string as a sentence. So what we're doing here is we are saying, here's our variable name. The console is going to print out, please enter your name. You're going to assign that variable, whatever the user enters, and then print it back out. And let's actually add some verbage here. And just type, you know, you entered semicolon with a space. That way we can see what the user actually entered. Press F5. Please enter your name. So enter your name. My name happens to be Brian. Press enter. It says you entered Brian. That's a very simple way of getting user input and assigning it to a variable. Now I'm not going to go very far with this tutorial because admittedly this is the fourth time I've tried recording it and I always go over the 10-minute mark that YouTube imposes. But I also want to keep this very simple. Just remember a variable is something that will change. A console window is a black window that spits out text and you can enter text into it. All there is to it. This is not going to be a hard concept. We're going to handle this in small chunks and I promise you you'll get there. So if you have any questions, rewind the video, watch it again. If they're still not clear go ahead and shoot me an email and let me know. Hope you found this video educational and entertaining. Thanks for watching.