QB64: a modern "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code" tool?

[Fifi]

Hi all,

QB64 is a fantastic and enhanced modern "BASIC" (Beginner All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) development environment as an IDE especially with InForm and vWATCH add-ons to produce nice and very powerfull programs for Linux, OS/X and Windows.

More importantly, QB64 has a very friendly community (all of you folks).

However, when reading all the posts of all the sections of this forum, my feeling is that QB64 is not anymore dedicated to the first letter of the BASIC acronyme "Beginner".

Why do I say so?

Just because, even if the wiki is an excellent source, QB64 is missing a real Beginner "path" to learn it with a "book" showing with clear and documented samples  each word and function and how to use this excellent and today very efficient programming language.

I'm not talking about the basic algorythm that's another subject but how to use the language and its extensions with clear and documented samples and comments.

As a simple exemple: what is the difference between a SUB and a FUNCTION (with or without parameters) and why, how and when chose the first or the second option?

The QB64 code itself is a perfect sample of what should never ever be written by a coder (absolutely no comment, variable and function names unundertandable, etc.) that make it more than difficult to maintain or enhance by third parties, that is one of the main goal of an open source project (and I'm not speaking about doing any fork).

I know, most (if not all) of you are experienced developpers and what you get from the wiki and/or the online help is far enough for you.

But you're not "Beginners" anymore.

I'm ready to help writting such a free and open source book (why not in .pdf format) as long as I could get help from you folks for the code samples and comments.

I know, it's a huge task that I did for years for the products of my own company (my last user manual was a 650 pages "bible").

So, could you see me as a brand new hobbist discovering the QB64 complete environment and help me to make such a work that could help a bunch of people to join the QB64 community... and enjoy it?

Just my two cents.
Fifi

[luke]

Luke's Guide To Collaborative Publishing:
- Install LaTeX distribution of your choice
- Create basic structure of work and put it on github or similar
- ?
- Success!

You can't just ask people to start working on something like you do, that's disingenuous. Present at least the beginnings of somthing and ask peole to contribute to it.

Funnily enough this applies to open source prgramming too.

[SMcNeill]

Terry Ritchie has a nice website with a set of lessons for the beginner.  You should check it out sometime.

[FellippeHeitor]

www.qb64sourcecode.com

[Qwerkey]

Our community is one of creatives.  After a beginner (I still am!) has gone through Terry's excellent course, the Wiki here is a marvellous resource to try out anything which one doesn't already know.

[OldMoses]

I'm still something of a beginner, and probably always will be, or else I would have gone on to other languages. QB64 gives me the tools to make the most of that meager ability.