The QBASIC help "file" was really good for its time. That's basically how I learned. That plus a collection of QBASIC programs the nerds at my school passed a

The QBASIC help "file" was really good for its time. That's basically how I learned. That plus a collection of QBASIC programs the nerds at my school passed around and would occasionally add to. Basically, I would open one of those programs up, run it in QBASIC, and if it is awesome, I would try to figure out how it worked. If I came across something I didn't understand, I would pull up the help from QBASIC. My childhood self-learning experience is a good example of the importance of: 1. "open source" 2. a fast code-run cycle QBASIC, being an interpreted, pretty much guaranteed these two conditions inadvertently.