You're better off with DarkBASIC Professional. All netbooks come with Direct X 9.0c based graphics cards (with the exception of nVidia Ion and Ion2 which are direct x 10 and even less compatible with 8.1 which Classic uses), it's command set is newer and more capable, and it's fully compatible with Windows Vista and Seven which most netbooks come with pre-installed.
The Game Creators sell a couple of excellent books that'll teach you everything you need to get to grips with DarkBASIC Professional.
Hands on DarkBASIC Pro book 1
Hands on DarkBASIC Pro book 2
You can also read the sticky's in this room, the tutorials thread is a good place.
Remember DarkBASIC Professional comes with documentation as well, personally when I joined the community this and asking questions here is how I learned. Though I did already have a basic foundation in BBC Basic, GW Basic and a few other variants such as STOS on the Atari ST.
There's also a ton of video tutorials on my own youtube channel.
Daniel's youtube channel!
There are no compatible DLL's really, the expansion pack is already included for free, DarkBASIC Professional however has a ton, both free from this community and offically supported and paid for plugins on our site.
Learning animation is as challenging as learning programming, but 3D Crafter Pro sold on the TGC website will do the trick. If you want free, then you can't beat blender, it's a little challenging for new users to export compatible .x files, but once you get the hang of it, you'll have a skillset that extends far beyond modelling for DarkBASIC Professional. You even have the potential to to short movies, promotional material, advertising, loading screens, menu screens, artwork, sprites, and whatever else you might need. I'm no expert in Blender, but I'm ok with it, and it does produce some great stuff. Furthermore if you wish to develop for netbooks specifically learning to produce this kind of media in Blender 3D will allow you to add some beautiful graphics at relatively low system cost.
Starwaith and a few others are commercial successes, to get others you really only need to spend 10 minutes doing a youtube search. And even less if you're looking for DarkBASIC Professional games. Remember that we ourselves used DarkBASIC Professional to create FPS Creator which is selling very well.
There really is no benefit to using DarkBASIC Classic over DarkBASIC Professional. But if you really want to use an old language to make a game in, may I suggest you use DOS Batch files?
