Book - Programming for the Absolute Beginner 2nd Edition

Programming for the Absolute Beginner 2nd Edition by Jerry Ford

I was excited to see that a second edition of Jerry Ford's programming book was recently released.  It uses Just BASIC (all examples also compatible with Liberty BASIC) to teach the fundamentals of programming.

Jump to Amazon's link

Here is the table of contents.  :-)

1 Introduction to Programming
2 Creating Programs with Just BASIC
3 Creating Graphical User Interfaces
4 Working with Variables and Arrays
5 Making Decisions with Conditional Logic
6 Using Loops to Process Data
7 Improving Program Organization with Functions and Subroutines
8 Working with Text Files
9 Working with Sound and Graphics
10 Arcade-Style Computer Game Development
11 Debugging Your Applications

GETCLIENTRECT - Gettting the dimensions of the inside of a window

Sometimes it comes in really handy to know exactly what the limits of the inside of a window are.  For example, if your Liberty BASIC program opens a window that is 500x400 pixels and you want to draw graphics that fit precisely or you are creating a game.. Think of Space Invaders where the aliens march back and forth on the screen!  You need to know the precise inner dimensions of the window so you need to know how thick the window frame is and also the title bar on top of the window.

The trouble is, these measurements are not going to be the same from one version of Windows to another, and they change if you modify your system font sizes.

So what to do?  Windows provides us a way to get the dimensions of the inside of the window by using the GETWINRECT function.

    WindowWidth = 500
    WindowHeight = 400
    open "get client rectangle" for window as #w
    'Get the window handle
    hndl = hwnd(#w)
    'Declare the struct which will be used to get the window client rectangle
    struct winRect, orgX as long, orgY as long, cornerX as long, cornerY as long
    'Make the GetClientRect call
    calldll #user32, "GetClientRect", hndl as ulong, winRect as struct, result as Boolean
    'Grab the width and height from the struct
    wide=winRect.cornerX.struct-winRect.orgX.struct
    high=winRect.cornerY.struct-winRect.orgY.struct
    notice "inside of window frame width = "; wide; " height = "; high

Lunar lander revisited

Liberty BASIC comes with a nice introduction to video games called lander.bas.

• It's a good example of a timer driven game.
• It uses sprites which are actually generated on the fly using turtle graphics.
• It also shows proper technique of structured programming.

So I have some ideas that I am thinking about implementing to update it and make it an even more complete video game example:

• Add sound effects including ambient sounds, rocket motor noise and crash explosion.
• Animate the rocket motor so you can see rocket exhaust coming out.
• Add some flying space junk sprites that you need to avoid while trying to land.
• Add a colored starfield in the background.

Looking forward to this!  Check back for updates!

Who says you can't do that in BASIC?

Over at the Liberty BASIC forum on Conforums they've announced a programmer of the month for September.  Chung, a prolific Liberty BASIC programmer has created an OpenGL flight simulator in Liberty BASIC.   Very, very nice!

  Click to read the announcement and make sure to follow the link to Chung's site to see the flight simulator!