Learning to Program with BASIC

I have been thinking about the best way to teach my son computer programming.  He is almost finished with 8th grade.  Out of all the different ways to introduce someone to programming, I think that one of the two best ways is with the BASIC programming language.  I will write later posts to discuss the other languages I have considered.

There are a number of ways to teach programming in Basic.  Basic was designed as a language to teaching programming.  I recommend avoiding Visual Studio because it is expensive and a burden to learn on top of learning a language.  There are free versions of Visual Studio called Visual Studio Express.  There is a free Visual Studio Express for Visual Basic. You could use Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) inside Excel to teach programming.  This might be the best approach to learn Basic, but it might be a bit much for an absolute beginner.

You could use VBScript to teach programming.  You can use a text editor to write the code.  As an example, open up Microsoft Notepad, type the following line into a file that you save as HelloWorld.vbs by selecting "All File Types" and naming it with the dot vbs extension.

msgbox "Hello, World!"

 Double click on the file and it will launch this window:

Click OK and the message box will close.  You can create useful programs with a simple text editor if you write VBScript programs.  I recommend the Notepad++ editor I mentioned in an earlier post.  VBScipt is definitely worth learning.  The dot vbs extension stands for VBScript.  The Windows operating system knows what to do with VBScript files.  If I were to teach a beginner to program in VBScript, I would consider using Microsoft WSH and VBScript Programming for the Absolute Beginner by Jr Jerry Lee Ford Jr.  However, this might be a bit much for an absolute beginner.

Perhaps the best way to teach Basic is with a self contained and simplified implementation of Basic.  The book Programming for the Absolute Beginner by Jerry Lee Ford Jr. would be the one I would probably get.  This book uses a free version of Basic called Just Basic that you can download for free and test by Googling "Just Basic tutorial".

Once you know the fundamentals of programming, then more advanced books might be easier to digest.

The other choice I would consider for a first programming language is the C programming language, but I will discuss that in another post.

Robert