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I'm a perl programmer through-and-through. Perl is LOADED with shortcuts and multiple ways of doing things, along with several methods that actually "assume" what you mean by your context. I never got a proper introduction to BASIC, and I'm finding the transition to be an extremely daunting task based on the current DBPro documentation available. Does anyone here know of a solid BASIC reference book I could look at to get a solid understanding of the BASIC language before I try to further interpret the DarkBASIC functions, or is DarkBASIC too unique to make a good comparison? Which version of BASIC does DarkBASIC mimic most closely (ie, Visual BASIC, GW-BASIC, QBASIC)? Any help at all would be greatly appreciated!

I used a QBasic book called Qbasic by example, it teaches the very basics, for next loops and arrays an stuff. The problem is some of it is quite basic, im unsure wether you will know many of the principles from perl programming, it may be completley differnet, it is a very good introduction and most of the commands can be used, or a very similar to dark basic, dark basic just has loads of new ones.

I've found that the concepts from every programming language are portable...it's just the syntax that's not.

Also, I've found that DBPro is a bit more limited than Perl (okay, a LOT), so I'm having a little trouble understanding how certain things are done. For example, if I wanted to parse a text file in Perl, I would simply write a reg-ex pattern for the text I wanted. However, I (finally) discovered that parsing through a text-file using a language that doesn't have a reg-ex engine (like DBPro), you have to parse strings character by character (ug). Not a problem, just something I would have liked to know earlier. I guess I'm looking for a book on BASIC that teaches more of the little tricks people use. Something similar to the "Perl Cookbook", "PHP Cookbook", and "C Cookbook". These books have common problems and their common solutions. Such as "Traversing an Array", or "Converting DDMMYY to a Unix Epoch Second", or "Opening a File". I suppose I could get some of these things from the tutorials, and I often do, but I'm looking for something a bit more complete and BASIC specific. Anyone know?