Thankyou for the advice

You can cycle your tank with barbs, you just need to keep a close eye on your ammonia and nitrites and be prepared to do daily or every other day water changes till the cycle is complete. You didn't mention the size of your tank, which will determine the number of fish you can safely start out with.

OK, saw in your other post you have a 20g tank. I would start out with no more than 3 fish.

Have you considered doing a fishless cycle? Cycling can be really hard on fish. Ammonia burns their gills - even if they seem fine during the cycle they may suffer damage you can't see. A fishless cycle take time and patience, but it guarantees that your fish won't be hurt or even die as a result of the cycling process.
If you choose to cycle the tank with fish I recommend that you add them slowly (only one or two per week), and do frequent water changes to keep ammonia and nitrite levels low.

I had tiger barbs a few years back

Started off with 3 little fellas, albino siblings-- they were so small I thought they were some kind of tetra at first. Anyway, first I had everybody in a little 2 gallon, then within one week got a new 20 gallon tank set up. Those tiger barbs are so hardy!!! They survived every kind of harship imaginable (I knew nothing about the proper cycling procedures we're learning about here on AC..!)-- I don't know what size tank you have, but I heartily endorse tiger barbs as a start-up fish. They are fun to watch, really interactive with each other. GL

p.s. those same 3 tigers survived 2+ years before I needed to sell my tank, guess they came from good stock.

p.p.s. they also did great with my mollies, which are a good fish that will interact with You! (( Dare I say, they were friendly??))

Use the fishless cycle method. That way, you can introduce the entire bioload of the tank at once and don't have to wait out mini cycles with each addition. It also allows you to have whatever fish you want as soon as its done without having to get "cycling" species. Furthermore, no fish are harmed; cycling is an *incredibly* stressful, uncomfortable, and often deadly thing. Ammonia and nitrite literally burns the fishs' flesh. Using simple ammonia is not only cheaper than buying fish, but you don't have to continuously be doing water changes to keep the nitrites/ammonia at safe levels.

If you choose to go the fishless route I would still recommend increasing the fish load slowly a few at a time evry ten days or so. I have never heard that fishless cycling allows you to add all the fish you want all at once.

Not only does fishless cycling allow you to add your full, final stocking load immediately after completion, it requires that you do.

The underlying principle of fishless cycling is that by adding the recomended ammonia levels you build up nitrifier colonies much larger than necessary to handle the final stocking. Since you are providing them with ample food, it should, in principle, allow you to build colonies as large as there is surface area to support them.

After you add fish, you are (obviously!) not adding ammonia any more, the food source for the nitrifiers comes from fish-produced ammonia. The bacterial colonies will begin to die off, their population dropping to match the available food, i.e. the amount of ammonia produced by the fish.

If you add the full stock, the colony sizes will shrink to meet that load. If, on the other hand, you add only a few fish, the colony size will shrink to meet this lesser load. Then every new addition will have a mini-cycle. It's not as bad as a full-blown strat-up cycle because with both colonies present they can grow to meet the new, higher load, but the fish are still exposed to NH3 and NO2 nonetheless. Not for as long, or to as high concentrations (probably), but it's still there.

But more importantly, why bother when the colonies are there and sufficient to support the full stock? After the weeks of waiting, you have a tank ready to safely hold the full stock, so why aim low at this juncture?

Good explanation. I did not factor in the idea that you can build up a surplus of bacteria if you use large amounts of ammonia.