Heya and welcome here. I hope you have fun in your calculator programming experience. Feel free to ask questions in the help forums if you have any.

As for languages learning, I suggest trying to understand BASIC first, making sure to know the main commands before you switch to Axe. Later, you could try assembly, although that can be harder.

EDIT: Also when coding, do a lot of backups of your progress on a computer or in the calculator archive memory in case a crash occurs, so you don't lose everything.

Basic, sadly, doesn't come with built-in sprite support.  Therefore, to get sprites, people resort to tricks, like text-sprites.  I think they work by overlapping two or more characters on top of each other...
I never got the hang of sprites in Basic, either.

Text Sprites are actually offset graphscreen text that creates certain patterns. In a second I'll write what I really want to but just wanted to get that out real fast

First off, I would like to welcome you to Omnimaga. I really hope you enjoy your stay.

A lot of people have already covered a lot of stuff that you've asked but I'll add or something to it in someway

Firstly, it's fine that you're new to programming. We all were at some point so don't be afraid to ask questions when you are stuck or something. We would love to help you out. Also, as many people have said, TI-BASIC Developer is probably one of the best places to learn TI-BASIC. It has very thorough explanations of all the commands, how they are used, optimization tricks and everything But since some things can be confusing over there too just ask us if you need I would also like to point you to my thread here that contains a list of all the tutorials, to my knowledge, on Omnimaga (I have a few very nice TI-BASIC ones that you might be interested in checking out ) as well as a few other places that are not just for programming.

As people have said, I would suggest you start out with Pure TI-BASIC first since you're pretty new to programming. However this isn't always the case for everyone. If you understand pointers and other things then Axe is a good language to learn since it has the speed of Assembly but a syntax that is similar to TI-BASIC. Assembly should (I say should because some people may already know other Assembly languages before hand or something) be the last language you learn since you are basically programming one step away from pure binary (which is what the calculator reads in the end), I believe. So it can be quite difficult to learn. But there are good references to learning Assembly too, like our very own Hot_Dog (one of our Admins) has taken the time to write a tutorial about getting started into Assembly, which can be found here. There is also a much older tutorial that is on ticalc.org that is called Learn TI-83 Plus Assembly in 28 Days, located here, but that has been notorious for being a little difficult to follow sometimes, depending on the person. So I suggest Hot_Dog's

The shell thing has basically been covered now though. But basically what they are is a way of running Assembly made programs, though you can run TI-BASIC games as well, though a little overkill (unless you're using DoorsCS library commands which need it to run). There are a few different shells that are around. The only one that is still in development is DoorsCS 7 over at Cemetech by KermMartian, though you can find links in the thread here on Omnimaga. (Note: Cemetech is another calculator community focused on TI calculators run by KermMartian.)

As has been mentioned, Pure TI-BASIC has no internal sprite support. So that leaves us to using tricks that we've learned to do them. I wrote a post about most of the different methods here so that might be something to check out too. There are also ways of achieving graphics with the use of Assembly libraries, which are basically Assembly routines that are used by TI-BASIC programmers to do things faster or make things look good. Probably the most well known Assembly library is xLib. When you introduce these into TI-BASIC programming it is called Hybrid TI-BASIC.

So, hopefully this has helped you some and, again, I hope you enjoy your stay here

Wow....a lot of posts in one day.
I also think you have the highest respect-to-post ratio. It's undefined.

So...yeah.  Welcome to Omnimaga!

Who do you think has the highest respect-to-post ratio?

Ah ok.

@meishe91, thanks for all the advice. I have this thread bookmarked so I can come back to remember all the information you guys are giving me . I haven't posted outside this thread because I thought it might be more efficient to ask all my intro questions here, but I'll take your advice DJ Omnimaga and post in some other places so I can gain access to the basic features . I just have one more question that I might as well ask here, it's directed toward ztrumpet: I like your suggestion about the homescreen games using text sprites, however I can't figure out how you entered some of those symbols into the calculator. I suppose it might have something to do with the program you linked, which I downloaded, but I don't really know how to use it. Could you explain the process of entering a symbol, like the omega one you used for Falldown, into the calculator?