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Best book to learn basic — Parallax Forums

Best book to learn basic

OmegabloodOmegablood Posts: 8
edited 2011-03-28 18:02 in BASIC Stamp
I'm looking for a book to learn basic in order to program the basic stamp more proficiently.

Comments

  • Clive WakehamClive Wakeham Posts: 152
    edited 2011-03-28 03:44
    http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?84949-Learn-language-of-BASIC
  • John KauffmanJohn Kauffman Posts: 653
    edited 2011-03-28 16:01
    The problem for you is that there is not much published on BASIC itself. There are now many flavors, primarily Visual Basic (VB) and that is coded in an environment called Visual Studio (free). There are thin variants (no pun intended) of BASIC, include PBASIC, which is stripped down to fit in a resource-constrained device.

    So I think your options are going to be books on VB.

    The trick in a VB book is to not spend time on things like forms, controls, objects, system resources, creating modules, error handling, dialogs and all the stuff that makes VB so powerful on the PC. Those topics do not apply to the STAMP. What you really want is just the concepts of variables and how to use control structures like IF, DO, FOR. So I would get only the most basic of VB books and ignore all sections that discuss forms and controls.

    WAM has a good introduction to many PBASIC commands, albeit not all of the PBasic topics in one place.

    For my intro VB courses I spec Michael Halvorson: Microsoft Visual Basic 2010
    For you, focus on chapters 5-7 which are somewhat generic for all flavors of basic
    Chapters 1-2 give you a little of VB and VS so you can do some testing of material in ch 5-7
    An alternate : Joe Mayo: Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
    Both are thin and relatively cheap compared to other trade texts. But remember that a lot of the texts from Parallax are down-loadable in PDF for free.

    Good luck.
  • vaclav_salvaclav_sal Posts: 451
    edited 2011-03-28 18:02
    This may sound stupid, but I would suggest to obtain ( beg borrow or steal - you do not have to buy it!) Kernighan & Ritchie "The C programming language" and read it as a book only. Not as a text book! You will get a feel what makes high level language tick.
    Than get yourself (using same method as above - do not buy it!) Sam's Teach Yourself Visual Basic x ( mine is VB6) and go thru Part II only!.
    As John said - stay away from anything "windows graphics"

    You said you want to "program the basic stamp more proficiently".
    Now come up with an application requiring 25% more of memory your BS setup has and start coding!
    Or - download someone else program and make it run in 25% less of memory!

    To learn PBASIC - read the command description and run the sample code.
    Adopt a coding format ( variable naming etc.) you like and stick with, use DEBUG and comment your code.

    You are on the right track. Best of luck to you.

    Vaclav
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