One of a computer's central duties is controlling what happens when certain conditions are met. When you click on a folder, you expect it to open; when you type on the keyboard, you expect the text to mirror your keystrokes. Writing code for applications or games is no different, they both need to behave in a certain way in one state, and in another when conditions change. In programming terms, this is called control flow, which is apt because it's literally controlling the flow of code execution across different scenarios.

In addition to working with control statements, we'll be taking a hands-on look at collection data types. Collections are a category of types that allow multiple values, and groupings of values, to be stored in a single variable. These go hand in hand with many of the control-flow scenarios you'll commonly run into, so it's natural that we...