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Programming in Small Basic

By gregladen on April 26, 2017.

Learn to Program with Small Basic: An Introduction to Programming with Games, Art, Science, and Math is yet another addition to the growing list of programming books for people interesting in learning programming.

Basic is an under-appreciated language. I wish I had a good basic compiler handy, and I'd love to see a basic scripting version that worked like bash. Can you see the value of that?

Anyway, Small Basic is an updated modernish basic that runs only on Windows, so while I can't use it, you might, and this book looks like a good intro. From the publisher:

Small Basic is a free, beginner-friendly programming language created by Microsoft to inspire kids to learn to program. Based on BASIC, which introduced programming to millions of first-time PC owners in the 1970s and 1980s, Small Basic is a modern language that makes coding simple and fun.

Learn to Program with Small Basic brings code to life and introduces you to the empowering world of programming. You'll master the basics with simple activities like displaying messages and drawing colorful pictures, and work your way up to programming playable games! You'll learn how to:

  • Store and manipulate data with variables
  • Process user input to make interactive programs
  • Use if/else statements to make decisions
  • Create loops to automate repetitive code
  • Break up long programs into bite-sized subroutines

    • Inside, you'll find hands-on projects that will challenge and inspire you. You'll command a turtle to draw shapes, program magical moving text, solve all kinds of math problems, help a knight slay a fearsome dragon, and more! Each chapter ends with extra practice examples so you can take your programming skills to the next level!

    Check it out!

    Tags
    Technology
    coding
    programming
    Small Basic
    Technology

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    I learned programming in Basiic on Apple IIs and Commodore 64s - and still love it. I actually have loaded QuickBasic on my laptop and written simple programs just for fun. That early exposure led to useful work; writing Rocky Mountain Basic (HP Basic) programs to automate testing at work.

    For over a decade now I've been writing in a templating language for test equipment - Fluke's Metcal. Metcal only recently became nearly as powerful as Basic. Only a few years ago did they add IF, WHILE, or DO loop structures!

    By Kevin Thomas O'Neill (not verified) on 26 Apr 2017 #permalink

    Kevin - I may have to give this a try - the closest I ever got to any kind of programming was writing batch file scripts to rum my BBS back in the early 90s. So I'm as a basic beginner as possible (OK OK p[un intended)

    By Doug Alder (not verified) on 27 Apr 2017 #permalink

    I also programmed in BASIC on Apple ][ (a ][e as a matter of fact) but found its lack of the Procedures and Functions so familiar to me using BASIC on Acorn 8-bit (similar Motorola 6502) computers a bitch. The memory architecture also was a bitch and fragmented especially for graphics modes. With Acorn BBC Basic one could also call an assembler.

    I might just resurrect some of these early computers I still have around here.