Visual Basic for Beginners

Welcome to Visual Basic for beginners, a section for students, hobbyist programmers and people who always thought programming was a tough task. If you are new to programming, VB is the best choice and has a history of being simple and easy to learn.

This section is also an introduction to the art and science of writing programs. Over the years VB has evolved into a powerful programming language for creating simple programs to complex applications. Its subset Visual Basic for Application is used in applications like Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access to provide additional automation functionalities. VB Script another subset is used for web programming and to create script tasks for Windows.

VB 6.0 introduced in 1998 for developing Windows applications is the most popular VB version till date. The newly launched VB 2008 is even better and its free version the express edition is a key Microsoft initiative to reach more people and give them the ability to have fun while creating cool software. You will be amazed as you learn and know how visual basic is used across applications, and to create applications.

Let's start visual basic for beginners with some fundamentals, if you already know programming you may want to skip this.



Programming Fundamentals

Fundamentally programs manipulate numbers and text. These are the building blocks of all programs. The following articles take you though the fundamentals one by one.

What is Computer Programming?
Variables and Data Types
Structured Programming
Operators for Manipulating Data

Learning Visual Basic

Visual Basic is often referred to using just the initials VB. It is an easy to learn programming language with advanced development environment from Microsoft. It enables you to rapidly development applications for Windows and the Web. What is Visual Basic? is where you will find all the introductory information.

The basis of this language is an earlier programming language called BASIC that was invented by Dartmouth College professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. You can learn more here History of Visual Basic.

One of the major reasons why Visual Basic has been so successful is that it includes everything that is necessary to write programs for Windows. You can put together an application using the components provided within VB itself.

Whether you want to use VB in Microsoft Excel / Access or write a script to do a specific task or develop applications for Windows and the web. Start your learning here with the following essential for Visual Basic programming.

Declaring Variables
Adding Comments
Building Programming Logic - Conditional Branching
Building Programming Logic - Conditional Looping
Using Subroutines
Using Functions
Scope of a Variable

Visual Basic Sample Code is another important page where you will find sample code for all variations of visual basic programming.

That's all in this visual basic for beginners section, you have covered all the basics. You can now go back to the home page and choose what you want to explore next depending on your area of interest.