This is it, the grand opening of the Liberty Basic Programmer's Encylopedia!
"...But what happened to the newsletter, and why an Encyclopedia?" you ask.
Well, first - the newsletters have not (and are not) going away. Bill Beasley still graciously hosts them HERE and you can always find them on line at the original Yahoo site as well. You find that we migrate some of the really great information to this forum.
But why an Encyclopedia? As the newsletter editors discussed the future and our vision for the next generation technical journal, we came to realize that we did not want a "journal". We have been publishing the newsletter for several years on a monthly basis, almost regularly at the end of the month. While this was nice for organization and it built community anticipation, it did not lend itself well to categorizing, searching or management by the staff. What we really wanted was something more like Wikipedia for Liberty Basic.
The advantages to the Wikipedia format for folks looking up information about diverse topics (over something like a giant stack of National Geographic magazines) is the categorization and simple search features. While the stack of National Geographic magazines might have the same information as Wikipedia, it certainly is not as easy to find. There is a second advantage, and that is freedom to publish when there is material to be published and to make that publication a more collaborative process with the author. The final advantage is timeliness of the information. In the newsletter older issues had great articles, but they applied to earlier releases of Liberty Basic and at times were incompatible with the current version. We did not have a simple mechanism to go back and keep these all up to date. We are hoping that the more dynamic nature of the wiki format will allow us to do exactly that, making a more useful and ageless knowledge base for future LB programmers
So here we are - May 1, 2006. The first official articles have been uploaded. The site is officially open! Browse around, kick the tires, let us know what you think!
Just a couple closing thoughts: Generally speaking we do not plan to list what articles are new or what changes have been made to the encyclopedia here in this blog space. From time to time you may read about something that we think is pretty neat and want to highlight. If you want to know what is new click the "Recent Changes" link in the upper left corner of the any wikispaces page.
Please be sure to familiarize yourself with this site's terms of service and license. If you have comments, please take those discussions to the Liberty Basic Forum.
Thanks and enjoy!
Announcing the February 2006 Liberty Basic Newsletter issue release.
API Corner:Revised File Download - by Alyce Watson
Working with Strings - Part 3 - by Brad Moore
Stylebits Corner: Dialogs - by Janet Terra
Eddie's Lessons, version 10 Customizing the Syntax Colors - by Alyce Watson
Liberty Basic Wiki, A Review - by Brad Moore
Using a Preprocessor With LB - by Rich Ries
Find Folder - by Stefan Pendl
Managing Multiple Listboxes - by Brad Moore
April 6th, 2006 - Carl Gundel has been invited to present his work on a new BASIC compiler to the New York City Smalltalk User's Group. Attendees will get a sneak peek at Liberty BASIC 5 and the new BASIC as well, and will also learn something about Smalltalk.
bradmoore
May 4, 2006
Welcome!
(by -This is it, the grand opening of the Liberty Basic Programmer's Encylopedia!
"...But what happened to the newsletter, and why an Encyclopedia?" you ask.
Well, first - the newsletters have not (and are not) going away. Bill Beasley still graciously hosts them HERE and you can always find them on line at the original Yahoo site as well. You find that we migrate some of the really great information to this forum.
But why an Encyclopedia? As the newsletter editors discussed the future and our vision for the next generation technical journal, we came to realize that we did not want a "journal". We have been publishing the newsletter for several years on a monthly basis, almost regularly at the end of the month. While this was nice for organization and it built community anticipation, it did not lend itself well to categorizing, searching or management by the staff. What we really wanted was something more like Wikipedia for Liberty Basic.
The advantages to the Wikipedia format for folks looking up information about diverse topics (over something like a giant stack of National Geographic magazines) is the categorization and simple search features. While the stack of National Geographic magazines might have the same information as Wikipedia, it certainly is not as easy to find. There is a second advantage, and that is freedom to publish when there is material to be published and to make that publication a more collaborative process with the author. The final advantage is timeliness of the information. In the newsletter older issues had great articles, but they applied to earlier releases of Liberty Basic and at times were incompatible with the current version. We did not have a simple mechanism to go back and keep these all up to date. We are hoping that the more dynamic nature of the wiki format will allow us to do exactly that, making a more useful and ageless knowledge base for future LB programmers
So here we are - May 1, 2006. The first official articles have been uploaded. The site is officially open! Browse around, kick the tires, let us know what you think!
Just a couple closing thoughts: Generally speaking we do not plan to list what articles are new or what changes have been made to the encyclopedia here in this blog space. From time to time you may read about something that we think is pretty neat and want to highlight. If you want to know what is new click the "Recent Changes" link in the upper left corner of the any wikispaces page.
Please be sure to familiarize yourself with this site's terms of service and license. If you have comments, please take those discussions to the Liberty Basic Forum.
Thanks and enjoy!
Announcing the February 2006 Liberty Basic Newsletter issue release.
Read online: http://babek.info/libertybasicfiles/lbnews/nl141/index.htm
Download archive: http://babek.info/libertybasicfiles/lbnews/nl141.zip
In this issue:
April 6th, 2006 - Carl Gundel has been invited to present his work on a new BASIC compiler to the New York City Smalltalk User's Group. Attendees will get a sneak peek at Liberty BASIC 5 and the new BASIC as well, and will also learn something about Smalltalk.