Learning Programming with Liberty BASIC
Trying to pick up programming from a book is like trying to learn judo by reading a pamphlet. In both cases, you may glean a theoretical understanding of the subject, but until you actually practice your skill, you don’t know how much you really picked up. To give you practical, hands-on experience in using an honest-to-goodness programming language, this part of the book explains how to install and use Liberty BASIC so that you can write real computer programs by using the BASIC programming language.
Writing programs in Liberty BASIC helps you to better understand how programming really works as you work with programs and see the results right on your own computer Liberty BASIC provides plenty of advanced features for displaying graphics, making sound, and debugging your programs. This part of the book shows you how to take advantage of these special features and shows you the principles behind writing programs in other languages at the same time. As do people, computers need a place to store information. People usually dump their information in wallets, purses, filing cabinets, or garages, but computers don’t have that luxury.
Instead, computers must store information in something known as a data structure. Every computer program uses data structures, and programmers invent all sorts of different data structures for various uses. So in this part of the book, I explain how every program uses data structures and provide hands-on examples you can try using Liberty BASIC Algorithms are a fancy way of telling a computer how to accomplish a specific task, step-by-step.
Conclusion
Think of an algorithm as a recipe that the computer blindly follows without question. One perfect algorithm doesn’t exist for writing all computer programs, just as one perfect recipe doesn’t exist for making all dinners. To make programming easier, programmers invent common algorithms for accomplishing certain tasks. This part of the book explains how those algorithms work and why you want to use them.
