Getting Started with Gambas

Gambas is a relatively easy language to learn and the surrounding component architecture is very much like the one you would use if you were using any other language or indeed operating system. (so you'd be needing to learn that part anyway)

If you are familiar with other RAD tools such as Visual Basic, Delphi or Kylix then you will find it relatively easy to get going and develop some very practical and good looking programs.

One of the main strengths of Gambas is it's robustness. It is unusual to have the IDE crash when developing code, and subject to coding bugs, it is unusual to have Gambas itself crash.

For an introduction and a fairly comprehensive guide to writing your first program, you might try reading the;

• Getting Started document produced by Sergio Hernandez

Hopefully more documents (and books?) will be listed here shortly.

Acquiring Gambas

You can either download a pre-packaged version of Gambas, or you can download the source code and compile it yourself. You will find it MUCH easier to use pre-packaged versions of Gambas and I would suggest you start here if possible. At the present time only certain distributions support Gambas, if your distribution is not supported, compilation may be your only alternative.

Gambas Package downloads

Compiling Gambas from Source

There are many options here and they will vary from distribution to distribution, so please read carefully. For more details see;

• Compiling Gambas page

Once you have Gambas running ...

• Become familiar with the resources available, starting with this website
• Subscribe to some of the mailing lists of some of the Forums
• Look through the Wiki Encyclopedia
• Check out the on-line software repository
  
• If you're migrating from Visial Basic, please read the Differences from VB page

Putting something back ...

Once you have some working programs, consider putting something back into the project, either by way of code contributions, or even financial contributions if you feel so inclined.