So You Want to Learn to Program?
A complete, free textbook that teaches anybody to program a computer — written for BASIC-256 by James M. Reneau, and free to read chapter by chapter.
About the book
Alongside the language, James M. Reneau wrote a complete, free textbook — "So You Want to Learn to Program? — BASIC-256" — a book to teach ANYBODY how to program a computer. Written originally for middle- and high-school students, it teaches programming step by step using sound, colour, shapes and text-to-speech, with full source-code examples for animations, games and applications. The chapters below remain hosted at the author's site, syw2l.org, and are linked here so they stay easy to find.
Table of contents
- Front Material
- Chapter 1 — Meeting BASIC-256: Say Hello
- Chapter 2 — Drawing Basic Shapes
- Chapter 3 — Variables
- Chapter 4 — Sound and Music
- Chapter 5 — Thinking Like a Programmer
- Chapter 6 — Your Program Asks for Advice
- Chapter 7 — Decisions, Decisions, Decisions
- Chapter 8 — Looping and Counting
- Chapter 9 — Custom Graphics: Your Own Shapes
- Chapter 10 — Functions and Subroutines
- Chapter 11 — Mouse Control
- Chapter 12 — Keyboard Control
- Chapter 13 — Images, WAVs, and Sprites
- Chapter 14 — Printing
- Chapter 15 — Arrays: Collections of Information
- Chapter 16 — Mathematics: More Fun With Numbers
- Chapter 17 — Working with Strings
- Chapter 18 — Files: Storing Information For Later
- Chapter 19 — Stacks, Queues, Lists, and Sorting
- Chapter 20 — Runtime Error Trapping
- Chapter 21 — Database Programming
- Chapter 22 — Connecting with a Network
- Back Material — Appendix
Book content © James M. Reneau, Ph.D., hosted at syw2l.org. Links open the original pages on the author's site. For the story of the language itself, see the About page.
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