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Author Topic: Back to BASICs  (Read 506 times)

lordcooper

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Back to BASICs
« on: September 06, 2011, 11:46:43 am »

I gotta learn Visual Basic 2008 and DarkBASIC for college.  Where would you recommend a complete beginner (I've only dabbled in Python) to look regarding books/tutorials?
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Eagleon

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Re: Back to BASICs
« Reply #1 on: September 06, 2011, 01:07:55 pm »

The visual portion of VB at least is pretty self-explanatory. You right-click components you drag and drop onto different forms, and create a handler for an event specific to that component. Then you go into the handler and put down your code, and voila, magic, it works when the event fires. Actually kind of fun, if you look past the fact that unless you're working for an insurance company you'll probably never use it again once you have access to a more powerful language.

If you learn one BASIC language, you've pretty much learned them all, with a few minor differences. I wholeheartedly recommend focusing on DarkBASIC if you can and then adapting to VB's changes, since that will let you focus on actually programming instead of messing with GUIs. Most VB tutorials will require you to spend at least a little bit of time on that, so you're better off with DB even if you intend to ignore GUI work. And 90% of an introductory VB course will be teaching things that anyone that has used a word processor for longer than a few days will have learned on their own - your job is to work ahead while you have the time so that you can grasp the more advanced concepts when they're thrown at you. Still pay attention, of course, because you do need to write functional VB code, but it's a time-sink your teacher will expect the brighter students to work over instead of through.

http://www.thegamecreators.com/?m=view_product&id=2030&page=tutorials Have you looked at these? The second (binary moon) looks like it provides more of an overview of the basics, which is what you need first for any language. Other than that, I suggest browsing/posting in their forums for help when you need it, and to come up with a few small side-projects you can do to better understand what you're learning as you go through other people's work.
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