Learn to Program with Small Basic: An Introduction to Programming with Games, Art, Science, and Math

Just what I needed.

This book is very good and easy to read.

I have been programming a very long time as well. Two-level table of contents in the front and detailed index in the back make it easy to find out what is covered. The instruction proceeds through many tiny lessons and examples. I bought this book and "The Developer's Reference Guide to Microsoft Small Basic. Both are useful to get up to speed with Small Basic. Learn to Program ... is much more useful given all of the help to look things up.

After going through the book then search for -Small Basic Collision physics, Soko, and Tetris. to download the complete source code.

Great book... Lots of info

Although a scan of the table of contents may make the book sound like a Computer Science 101 text, it is the structure within those chapters and Marji and Price’s engaging writing style that really sets this book apart. It is clearly written with an eye towards a middle school audience. The text is easy to read and filled with little jokes and gags that are guaranteed to make the coolest 13-year-old roll her eyes (that’s a good thing). But beyond the standard descriptions of concepts and examples, my favorite part of the book by far is that each chapter provides the reader with challenges that utilize the new content introduced in the chapter and draw on what has been previously learned. So often, computer programming books are filled with math-based challenges (count by 2s . . . now count by 3s . . . find the prime number . . . is the number a square) that would put a classroom of middle school students (and their teacher) to sleep. These challenges, on the other hand, keep their audience in mind. They are engaging and creative and appropriate for a middle school aged audience. Further, they leverage the website for the book to provide resources, hints and solutions. Readers can access comment-only “starter” files to get them moving and provide a roadmap for their projects or, if they get hopelessly stuck, can access solutions — all online. I particularly like the fact that the solutions do not appear in the book itself. That would make it too easy to simply page to the back and type in the solution. By requiring the reader to take the additional step of hopping online and navigating to the correct URL before seeing a solution, readers are encouraged to keep trying to solve the challenges on their own. In Learn to Program with Small Basic, Marji and Price have accomplished something very difficult. They have created an outline of basic computer science principles that is appropriate for middle schoolers in a text based programming language. Many of the resources that are currently being produced are of the drag-and-drop, block-based graphical structure. While I believe that these are a great way to get younger students interested in coding, the Small Basic programming language and its intuitive IDE has worked incredibly well in my middle school classroom. In my end of course surveys, a strong majority of students (nearly 70%!) recommended that I limit the use of block-based programming languages in order to provide them with even more opportunities to do text-based programming with Small Basic. I am certain that Learn to Program with Small Basic will be a trusted companion as I expand this portion of my course and I am thrilled that such a resource is available.

Small Basic is a pretty good program to use, after Scratch or Code.org (the drag and drop coding) and before you go on to Python or Java. This book is the best at showing you what you can do with Small Basic! You'll find a ton of tutorials throughout the book, challenges in the back of each chapter, and even more online resources to keep learning, including tests for teachers and parents to use! Also, all the big programs in the book have their code available for download (templates and final solutions), so that you can see what you did wrong (or need to do next). I love the amount of resources they provided to help parents, teachers, and students!

The actual contents are actually fine, however, the reading experience on iPad is screwed up, code is not displaying properly :( On the browser, the code is dispaying properly.

I did purchase the book. I was hoping that Microsoft finally had a replacement for the basic program that came with dos so many years ago. Much of that program is still lacking.

This is a really excellent book covering just about everything you need to know on the subject. JP.

Ignore any negative comments from other reviewers. This text is the one to get as it gives sound coding examples together with a range of exercises and challenges. It doesn't fall into the trap of giving listings to just be copied. I have had no problem downloading and using the solutions and other resources. Highly recommended.