I am on the record as a massive fan of freebasic. In fact, the original purpose of fbxl.net was to host my magazine regarding freebasic, FBXL magazine.

The thing that I like most about free basic is it is syntactically very intuitive and in a lot of ways almost like speaking English, but at the same time it doesn’t give up on any of the power of a real programming language. Besides being a clone of quickbasic 4.5 or PDS 7.1, it is a protected mode language by default, it can use a GCC back end to get all of the benefits of that compiler, and it has features such as pointers, inheritance and object orientation as well as support for a lot of standard c libraries in addition to a robust standard Library.

One of the things I would like to get done for this year is writing a book about freebasic, in particular going from the very beginning where you haven’t even downloaded it yet all the way to producing substantial programs using each of the main features of the language.

One thing to be aware of, freebasic is just a compiler. It doesn’t come with a built-in IDE. There are a number of IDEs that you can use, FBide is very popular one that was developed back when free basic was first popular, it hasn’t been updated in a very long time but it’s a very nice simple ide that supports basic features such as syntax coloring, auto tabbing, and compiling and going to errors within the IDE.

The IDE that I use today is called winfbe. It is significantly more powerful than FBide, and even includes a visual editor for Gui applications. I found it to be a much better choice for developing more complicated applications.

Most IDEs are integrated with a copy of the help file which is itself generated from the wiki.