This document is copyright 2001 - 2004 Billy Wenge-Murphy.
It may not be reproduced without permission
Misc Tutorials
Some stuff I wrote:
Qbasic Tutorial -
Mainly aimed at beginners. No advanced stuff yet.
ASM Tutorial. -
Also, beginner level
Bit Manipulation -
Advanced level - How to manipulate individual bits for more
percision and control.
QBasic/ASM Programming
We (DoORKnob Soft) generally program in BASIC using QuickBasic
4.5. We use BASIC for a number of reasons. Mainly because it's
the language we started programming in.
We stick to it because it's a good language. It's easy enough
that pretty much anyone, no matter how computer literate or
illiterate, can use it; Mastering the language, however, is
something else altogether.
Truthfully, things would be even easier programming in C (which I
also know) because C/C++ are so much more flexible, but BASIC is
good enough that we don't give it up.
The major downside to BASIC is that it's generally not very fast,
especially when it comes to graphics.
For this reason we've lately begun to use Assembly Language (ASM
for short) to do the small but important tasks that BASIC
performs poorly at.
If you'd like to learn either how to program - either in BASIC
or ASM - i've written some tutorials on these subject(s).
Keep in mind I'm no expert at these languages, I've taken no
classes on them, and I'm not a teacher. But, I do have a fair
amount of experience with them, and in my opinion, am a fairly
good programmer.
I find many tutorials around the internet to be quite esoteric,
and not exactly clear. All too many people write tutorials
without keeping in mind that thorough explanation is necessary.
To understand something as a whole, you need to understand the
parts that go into, and many tutorials fail in this respect.
For this reason, I wrote my tutorials in what I think is
a thorough, easy-to-understand fashion.
So, what do you want to learn?
If you've never programmed before, I recommend
reading the Qbasic Tutorial.
ASM is probably the hardest language in the world to start with.
If you already have some experience - say, maybe
you program in a language or 2, then you might want to try
reading the ASM
Tutorial. ASM is more challenging, but it's well worth it.
C & Others
C
- this is probably the most widely used, most useful, most
accepted, language. It's also seen as a "Professional"
language, while BASIC is looked on as a "newbie" (or n00b,
if you're the kind of dork who says stuff like that). I guess I
could write about C if I wanted to, but I'd rather not, because I
hardly use it, so information from me on the subject would be
quite unreliable.
However, this tutorial (not written by me) is excellent: A Tour
Of C programming