I loved it when they didn't say what basic it was for. My dad ended up meeting a author of a few of the programs and he said, "Oh I never got that basic program to ever run." My dad was like my 9 year old fix it and walked away. He was proud and mad. It took me weeks to get things fixed.
Oh yes. I had a TRS-80 Color Computer, and the BASIC dialect (though written by MS) was slightly different in some details, so I was usually translating things at least a little. Things like color and graphics were completely different from system to system.
LOL. I had an Atari 130XE so examples for IBM Basic, Apple ][ and Commodore didn't work either!
Even worse if the examples were for the Spectrum, which had an even more peculiar dialect!