Learning PlayBASIC with a DarkBASIC book?

[midipixel]

Hi guys. I´m here again and I decided to give PB a try after all. I want to have fun while learning and Actionscript wasn´t giving me that.

To the point... I´ve been reading the book "Beginner´s Guide to DarkBASIC" and I found it to be very well written and  I felt it provide many useful information for a noob in games programming like me. I wish to use it as a learning resource, as it teaches some fundaments on game programming, while PB´s documentation works more as a reference.

So, the question is: Would it be possible to learn from a DarkBASIC book while using the PlayBASIC IDE? Another option would be buying DB Lite, learn from the book and then switch to PB. However, I think DB´s IDE sucks, so I don´t think this would be the best option.

What would you advise me to do?

[kevin]

      Well, to make am analogy.    Your basically asking   can use the book "Learn French In Ten Days" to learn German ?    Still,  sound reasonable to you ? - I wouldn't think so.

      PlayBASIC and DB share some core syntax similarities, but that's about it.    So the mechanics of the language are sort of the same.  But that's largely true for all dialects of BASIC.    The programming principals/methods you'd learn from the  book or pretty much any programming book, are largely universal however.  

What would you advise me to do?

  install something, tinker, read/ask.. repeat...............

 

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[midipixel]

Thanks for clarifying things,  Kevin. I really thought I was asking can I use the book "Learn British English" to learn american english. But I see now that´s not the case.

I´ll see what I can learn from PB´s documentation and from this forum as well.

[kevin]

I really thought I was asking can I use the book "Learn British English" to learn american english.

   In terms of language cores that's pretty much true.  The fundamentals are indeed much the same.   So stuff like Variables / Arrays / Arithmetic / Decisions / Loop structures  are transferable (all covered in PlayBASIC help btw).   On top of that,  they both share a number of  common Functions (ie.  math & string operations)   But that's largely true between any version of procedural BASIC out there.   So you could learn this stuff from a DB book, or even a C64 basic book from the 80's.   However, even though the language cores are similar,  they're not identical.   So entering a listing from one into the other won't always work.

  Once you move beyond the core similarities,  that when you see  they're nothing alike.
   

 

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[kevin]

Just to add to that, I have been thinking about writing some code transition tools.  Such as a DBClassic to PB (Primarily 2D though).