Qbasic: An Introduction to Programming

Rating:
Summary: Painfully boring, and introduces bad habits to boot...
Review: Stay away! I used this in a course I took, but there has to be a better QBasic book out there than this one.

The positives: If you've done any BASIC programming before, you can probably skim a lot of the book instead of having to actually (try to) read it.

The negatives: This book makes programming confusing and even induces bad habits if you're going to be programming in other languages later (such as Visual Basic). Many variable names use dots (such as Pay.Rate$), which will make it confusing when you get to Visual Basic and find that dots mean something else entirely. The variables also use the obsolete symbols for declaring variable type (such as $ for string and % for integer), and most variables are declared in-line rather than explicitly, which is a bad habit to get into. (It's not that the authors don't know Visual Basic, as there's a short intro to Visual Basic at the end of the book. Hence it's that much more puzzling why the book doesn't introduce programming habits that can carry forward into VB.)

Besides serious concerns like this, the simple fact is that this is an incredibly boring book. The color scheme is ugly; the layout is irritating. You can't read more than a paragraph or two without having to skip your eyes all over the place, as the text is constantly interrupted by tables and charts and illustrations and other such garbage. The book uses more different font types than a sixth-grader trying to spruce up his first term paper. Trying to go through one chapter can bring on a migraine.

If you have to learn QBasic, look for some other book; if you use this one, don't say I didn't warn you. (And if you're taking a course which uses this one, point out your concerns to the professor/instructor, as I plan to!)