"Typing in a program from a magazine or book was always a crapshoot unless you really understood and could change the program simply because of the large number of different dialects of BASIC."

Which is how lots of us learned to program.

My biggest learning experience was translating a program from Pascal to BASIC; it seemed like a fairly simple translation, but it just wouldn't work. I finally realized the massive difference between GOSUB and a function call. I ended up having to implement my own stack to make things work.