Gregg,

I was considering starting learning Basic. I was wondering if you could help me choose a program to start with..

−Brian

Well if you have any Microsoft Office product you already have a version of Visual Basic. Outlook, Frontpage, Word, Excel and Access all have "Visual Basic for Applications" built in and you can do almost anything you could do with the real Visual Basic. I think the only thing you can't do is make a stand alone executable. In otherwords you can't make a program that will run without the application. To find out more, choose that program's help and search for "visual basic"

If you just want to learn old style basic Interplay makes a "Learn to program in Basic" program. http://www.interplay.com It's less that $20. It's made for kids, it's got lots of videos kind of like Beakman's World that explain programming in basic.

Also, and probably much better is DarkBasic.  I haven't personally tried it but it looks cool.

Other than that I don't know any good books on Visual Basic.

-gregg