Wayne asked: > I used to program in the old gwbasic in a ibm pc 20 years > ago...Can you suggest a starting place to look and which book to > start with? Wayne, You've come to the right place. I think you will find list members here eager to help you learn and progress. A special edition of FB used to come with an excellent tutorial that walked a beginner through the basics of BASIC programming. Unfortunately I have never seen a downloadable version of this tutorial. I'm going to make what some might consider a radical suggestion: To bring yourself up to speed on BASIC concepts, I recommend you find an online QBasic tutorial such as the one here: http://chortle.ccsu.edu/CS113/index.html QBasic and FB are both based on early dialects of the original BASIC. The QBasic language statements used at the elementary level of this tutorial are-- with a few exceptions-- interchangeable with FB. I just worked through first couple of chapters and compiled and ran the code examples with FB's Console mode checked under FB's "Command" menu. Console mode lets you concentrate on the elementary concepts of programming without worrying about building windows and window objects such as buttons, text- and picture-fields, etc. The aforementioned tutorial reviews: Arithmetic Expressions Variables Loops If-Then-Else Statements Logical Expressions String Variables For-Next Loops Nested Loops Arrays The nice thing about these fundamental coding concepts is that they are universal across all programming languages. There is no way to learn them other than by writing and running code. Despite the hard work, there are few things more gratifying than realizing you have grasped and made your own an important coding concept. As you work through the tutorial, you probably will run across syntactical differences in QBasic and FB. Post the problematic code here and most likely you'll have you answer in a few minutes. Here's your first exercise: 1. Launch FutureBASIC. 2. Go to FB's "Command" menu and slide down to "Console" and check it. 3. Go back to FB's "File" menu and select the first item: "New." This brings up an Editor window where you can begin writing code. 4. Type in the following lines (or you can cheat and copy them from this post and paste them in: Print "Hello World!" Print Print "What does 1 + 1 equal? "; 1 + 1 5. Go to FB's "Command" menu and select the first item: "Run untitled 1" 6. A window will pop up asking you if you want to save the code as an FB file. If you don't want to save your code click the Cancel button and the program will run. First will you see the Compiler window pop up and run down its checklist, and then a second window-- the Console window-- will open with the output of your executed program. 7. If you want to save the program as a compiled executable, at Step 5 above, select "Build untitled 1" under the Command window. This will open a dialog asking you where you want to save the compiled executable application. Select your Desktop and name the file "Hello World." The Compiler window will do its thing, and when it's over your first compiled application "Hello World" with the generic FB blue leaf icon, will appear on your Desktop. Double click it and enjoy. Welcome to FB. Ken