One of the better things built into this language are properties. Generally speaking, they are (usually) public members of a class that (typically) provide an easy way to read/write to attributes and (sometimes) compute something of interest (say, the Area of a Shape or the Probability I will love whatever movie Karen Gillian stars in ^{The answer is always 107%}.). These are not to be confused with attributes or data members (although the convention is to name the property after the attribute, capitalizing the first letter), which means that these cannot be used as ref or out arguments.

Let's look at the most common implementation of a property:

public class Slacker
{

private int alpha; // This is my private attribute

public int Alpha // This is my public property
{

get { return alpha; } // The attribute
set { alpha = value; } // "value" is the default name to the assignment operand

}

}

This will allow me to read/write the alpha attribute of my Slacker objects, by simply referring to the Alpha property. Such as, myObject.Alpha = 100;. As opposed to something like myObject.setAlpha(100);

[You]: This seems like a fairly contrived use of a property... I mean, I could just declare the attribute as public if there's no code that objects to how the value is modified!
[Me]: You're right but also, this is an example I'm writing out in HTML, which is annoying to format. So cut me some slack here!

You might find a use in specifying the set portion of any given property as private in order to only allow methods of that class to modify the corresponding attribute value. Such as public int Alpha { get; private set; }, which is a simpler implementation of what's listed in the above example.

[You]: Okay, but the methods of a class already have access to the private attributes...

That's also a good point, which I'm going to ignore and instead talk about another trick you can use. That is to define a get-only property that is defined by an expression instead of a single attribute value, like you might do if you have individual attributes for your first and last names, or the Department code and number of a class you're enrolled into.

public string Name => Last + ", " + First;
public string CourseListing => Dept + " " + Number;