Learning Basic4ppc?

[Stellaferox]

LOL! So did I, so why did we start this discussion? Too much free time on our hands....

[Erel]

The new Tutorials sub forum is now available: http://www.basic4ppc.com/forum/tutorials/

[ArchiMark]

Tutorials is great and very helpful, Erel....

In the meantime, I took the plunge an purchased Basic4ppc, so gotta learn it now!!

I have one or two books that cover BASIC. However, they are about the 'old BASIC', not the 'new BASIC' I'll call it...by 'new BASIC' I mean BASIC using a visual designer and forms, etc....so these books don't seem as relevant.

So, are there any books that would help learning this kind of BASIC they could recommend for a noob like me???

Thanks!

Mark

[Cableguy]

Form design is just another way of defining were and how the controls are placed int the work area (form)....Learning the basic structure of the coding language is very helpfull, and the "old BASIC" books can help a lot with that... Also controls can be created and placed in runtime, not needing any work in the form designer, if you want to understand how forms work, try a searh for "vb forms creation" or similar and you will find lots of usefull tuturials , that althought created with a nother coding language in mind, are very similar in the making to what B4PPC uses....But note that Not all properties and events used in those tutorials are available in Basic4PPC....

[ArchiMark]

Originally Posted by Cableguy

Form design is just another way of defining were and how the controls are placed int the work area (form)....Learning the basic structure of the coding language is very helpfull, and the "old BASIC" books can help a lot with that... Also controls can be created and placed in runtime, not needing any work in the form designer, if you want to understand how forms work, try a searh for "vb forms creation" or similar and you will find lots of usefull tuturials , that althought created with a nother coding language in mind, are very similar in the making to what B4PPC uses....But note that Not all properties and events used in those tutorials are available in Basic4PPC....

Thanks Cableguy for your explanations, very helpful!

Will check out what you suggest....

[ArchiMark]

Was at store the other day and saw several VB books; VB.Net and VB2005, etc....A few of them had tutorial like approach to them, where they lead you through the different programming concepts by building up a program piece by piece.

Do you think that this would be helpful for a dummy like me or would it be more confusing later when going back to Basic4ppc??

If you think it might be helpful, would it matter which version I get, VB.Net or VB2005, etc???

Thanks,

Mark

[bdiscount]

It could be more confusing than help. Read the help file for b4ppc and read the examples. take parts of the examples and write your own. Trial and error is a slow way of learning but it works. Thats how I started 27 yrs ago.

[ArchiMark]

Originally Posted by bdiscount

It could be more confusing than help. Read the help file for b4ppc and read the examples. take parts of the examples and write your own. Trial and error is a slow way of learning but it works. Thats how I started 27 yrs ago.

Thanks for your opinion, bdiscount!

Only reason I thought that the book might help is that it offers more than just a short illustration of something and gives you some background on the reasons or concepts behind why you do things a certain way. That's the one issue I have with just looking at examples, etc is that I don't often know why it's done this way versus that way or sometimes what I'm looking at....

Hope that makes some sense...

As for time it takes to learn, I hope that I can do it in less than 27 years as I'll be in the old folks home by then, if I make it that long, given my current age.....that's why I keep looking for relatively simple ways of accellerating my learning curve, besides the fact that since I work full-time (more than 40+ hours/week...) I don't have lots of free-time and unfortunately, don't have time right now to take a programming class or something like that.

My original thought that may have been very naive, was that by working with an onboard device IDE like basic4ppc offers, it would allow me to take advantage of the bits of free time that I do have periodically at lunch at work or between meetings, etc. Such that over some months I thought that this time would add up to something where I could make some progress....

Again, hope this makes some sense....

[Erel]

I recommend you to start with a Visual Basic 6 book rather than .Net (2003 / 2005).
Basic4ppc is built upon the .Net Framework and does resemble some of its characteristics, however it is more closer to VB 6 which is not an object oriented language.

[Cableguy]

Originally Posted by ArchiMark

Thanks for your opinion, bdiscount!

Only reason I thought that the book might help is that it offers more than just a short illustration of something and gives you some background on the reasons or concepts behind why you do things a certain way. That's the one issue I have with just looking at examples, etc is that I don't often know why it's done this way versus that way or sometimes what I'm looking at....

In Portugal we have a saying:

"IF you find someone who is hungry, don't give him a fish, teach him to fish"

I relate 100% to you, I alway try to understand why "its done that way", oposed to "it must be done that way"

As for time it takes to learn, I hope that I can do it in less than 27 years as I'll be in the old folks home by then, if I make it that long, given my current age.....that's why I keep looking for relatively simple ways of accellerating my learning curve, besides the fact that since I work full-time (more than 40+ hours/week...) I don't have lots of free-time and unfortunately, don't have time right now to take a programming class or something like that.

My original thought that may have been very naive, was that by working with an onboard device IDE like basic4ppc offers, it would allow me to take advantage of the bits of free time that I do have periodically at lunch at work or between meetings, etc. Such that over some months I thought that this time would add up to something where I could make some progress....

My background in coding has always been about BASIC, and I had stopped mess around with it for about 10 years, So when i pick it up with Basic4PPC, almost everything had "gone with the wind"...and I had to re-load all the keywords to my system again...
I was back codding in a week or so and had my first ever really complete app in about one month, so I would expect that those 27 Years you mentioned , really become abou one month or two for the basics, the rest, beeing basic4ppc an ever upgrading development tool, with all the new dll and such, will forever be a learning experience worth the while....

PS.: I would be up for the challange of writting a "hard-cover" book of basic4ppc, both in english as in my home language, but I figure I would need (lots of) help.....Anyone???