Total newbie advice for learning basic?

[gozar]

2 minutes ago, 256 colors said:

Whilst i accept their is gonna be a degree of some real typing into a emulator or real machine

I really do not want to type endless amounts of lines like back in day when magazines,books and listings and typos that was bad enough back then

Lost count of the amount time the Atari came close getting smashed 1000 bits just out of pure anger frustration for one stupid typo mistake

I typed in quite a lot of listing from Analog, without frustration. Maybe their error checker was better than most?

[256 colors]

Some times it's down to user error typos it's even worst when it's down to a bad listing just feels like entire waste of time

[flashjazzcat]

One may be required to type 'RUN' or 'LOAD' at some point, but the rest is a matter of preference. If you want to actually learn a programming language, typing it in by hand is a good way of doing so. I'm not talking about machine code data statements: I once typed in Paul Lay's 'Star Rider' from Page 6 magazine and it taught me nothing other than the importance of regular breaks from the computer. Typing in the assembly language source listing to 'Speedscript', however, tought me everything I needed to know at the time about how to create a full scale application in 6502 assembly language. Pasting it in would have been several hundred times quicker, but I would have learned next to nothing.

 

As for modern convenience: the weak link is in the source material. No quicker way to become disenchanted with the entire enterprise than to paste material full of errors into the emulator.

 

Start with shorter programs and type them in by hand. You'll learn how to correct errors and debug programs without having to worry about chasing down a mistake in a 500 line listing.

 

[+Stephen]

16 minutes ago, 256 colors said:

Whilst i accept their is gonna be a degree of some real typing into a emulator or real machine

I really do not want to type endless amounts of lines like back in day when magazines,books and listings and typos that was bad enough back then

Lost count of the amount time the Atari came close getting smashed 1000 bits just out of pure anger frustration for one stupid typo mistake

How else do you expect to learn?  Copying text in and typing run will teach you nothing except how to hit CTRL+C, CTRL+V.

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Stephen said:

How else do you expect to learn?  Copying text in and typing run will teach you nothing except how to hit CTRL+C, CTRL+V.

and Enter  ?

[_The Doctor__]

Maybe, but lot's of people typed in listing and still know nothing about what the put in the computer or how it does anything... They did however learn to type a little better though ?

 

Watching what happens and fixing bugs / errors... well sometimes they begin to learn from that...

Edited September 25, 2019 by _The Doctor__

[Justin Payne]

7 hours ago, 256 colors said:

I didn't think it was the pdfs were at fault just method of transferring the information into Altirra is hard not that it's a fault too

Theirs gotta be a way around this somehow we can't go back to the dark ages of typing every single line not in year 2019

Google does make the Tesseract OCR API available. It won't work straight out of the box so you'll have to train it. Git probably has a project or two that you might be able to try out but I suspect it will still need to train it for the specific font you're trying to convert. There are also more professional OCR applications but they will cost you some money.
If you become familiar with the BASIC syntax, a lot of that will stand out as bad and you can quickly fix it but it appear that the manner in which you're pasting this into the BASIC interpreter isn't going work without producing typos. Of course, you could look at it like this. Copy/Pasting wasn't an option back then so you're slightly ahead of the 1983 experience we all suffered through. 

 

[scitari]

You might check out my Atari Projects web page. I have over 80 projects for the 8-bit computer covering hardware, software, modern devices, emulators, and BASIC programming. Each project is designed to be quick with step-by-step instructions. I also recently published an Atari Projects book that covers 50 of the same projects with heavy editing and in sequential order. The web page is of course free. I hope you find the resource useful!

[256 colors]

Thank's for the info at the moment just ordered Sio2PC USB/50 new blank disks/Sdrive Max/30 Hour BASIC (National Extension College corres... by Prigmore, Clive Paperback

Despite what other people might think it's not about cheating or copying and pasting entire chunks of code or full and complete listings

Pretty sure i can learn from books,mags snippets and single lines of code if and were i can copy and paste for me that's bonus

[777ismyname]

15 hours ago, scitari said:

You might check out my Atari Projects web page. I have over 80 projects for the 8-bit computer covering hardware, software, modern devices, emulators, and BASIC programming. Each project is designed to be quick with step-by-step instructions. I also recently published an Atari Projects book that covers 50 of the same projects with heavy editing and in sequential order. The web page is of course free. I hope you find the resource useful!

Nice site!