Hi, welcome to the FB n00b tutorials. These are tutorials written specifically for newbies who have never done any programming in any language at all to learn to program, using the free programming language FreeBasic. FreeBasic is a 32-bit compiler for Windows, DOS, or Linux that is pretty much C-compatible and has many libraries ported to it. It's a work in progress, but it already has a lot of advanced features and it's steadily moving toward full OOP capabilities, among other things. Designed to be something of a successor to QB, it has advanced far beyond its predecessor, while retaining the easy learning curve of QBasic but becoming much more powerful. For anyone who wants to learn to program, my first recommendation would be FreeBasic.
I'd say these tutorials are a good way to learn FreeBasic. I don't claim to have the one best way for everything, and there are plenty of gaps in the tutorials (and even what I plan to add). I don't expect you to learn everything just from the tutorials. There are many resources to remember as well, like The Official Forums, the c0de forum, the wiki manual, and QB Express, just to name a few. Furthermore, I'll occasionally use concepts in the code I show you that I haven't even taught you about! I expect you to be smart, and try to learn. There's no point in my teaching you if you won't understand, so as you read you should think intelligently about what you read and try to figure things out on your own. I may also give assignments - these are of course entirely optional, but it would help if you try to do them. If not, at least think about how you would do them if you did. I write the tutorials sequentially, not necessarily in the best order but in an order I think is good for learning. Many resources are very carefully ordered; I don't do that, I just put things in the order I want to teach them. In my opinion they are ordered correctly, but others might not agree with me. Finally, I teach things that are not strictly necessary for programming, but which I think will greatly help you understand (as they've helped me). Remember I've been programming for a few years now, and so I base much of this on "what I wish I'd been taught when I first started." Understand that these are written for your benefit, to benefit you as well as possible. If you don't understand why I bother with something, you probably will after you've been programming for a little while!
The tutorials posted so far are here; as I add more (and be assured I will!) more will be added:
1: Basic Introduction to Programming 2: Conditionals 3: Looping 4: Variable types 5: Procedural and Modular Programming 6: Clarifying some important points 7: Numbers and how they work (what you never learned in school) 8: How your computer really works - A round-about introduction to pointers 9: File I/O
This is of course a work in progress; if you notice any problems you think should be addressed, feel free to e-mail me TheMysteriousStrangerFromMars@yahoo.com and tell me about it. Bear in mind that I don't check my e-mail every day, nor do I work on this every day, but I'll try to find time to work on it when I can. I do this as a service to the community, and anyone has a right to give suggestions.
Note: If you would like to download these tutorials for offline viewing/reference, you may do so. Here is a ZIP containing all the tutorials in HTML (along with the stylesheet, images, icons, and any other resources associated with the HTML pages, plus any extra source code or whatever that may be provided in links in the tutorials): fbn00b.zip (112k)