Programming in Small Basic [Greg Laden's Blog]

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!