[Venkatesh]

Nobody, nobody, and did I mention nobody learns just plain "BASIC"

QBASIC makes sense, as it is a very common BASIC dialect, and can do very fearsome things if used to the limit (think DirectX Sound and OpenGL Graphics and Integral Calculus and Networking).

What many people do is learn one flavor of BASIC and then experiment with other forms. Every mainstream BASIC is very similar to every other mainstream one, with small differences around the edges.

Note, Visual Basic does not easily fit this mold. I have used Visual Basic 1.0 for DOS, and it is more like QBASIC than current VBs. However modern VBs are entirely different beasts.