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Socoder -> Off Topic -> Usborne Coding Books

Tue, 09 Feb 2016, 07:49
rockford
Old programming books available for free (legally) - Linkage | Updated link
Tue, 09 Feb 2016, 07:49
Jayenkai
Already flicked through about 3 of these, this week. They're very complex for beginners books.. No wonder we all learned so much! Nowadays it's all "Click the happy smiling face to make it wink!" and there's barely any code at all.

*deletes from newsletter*


Oh, and I still think the Register's logo looks like Horace Goes Skiing


A better link : Usborne.com
(Since the Register page didn't seem to actually link to the Usborne site, and instead seemed to just steal the .pdf links.)

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Tue, 09 Feb 2016, 08:38
GfK
It's a miracle I got into programming at all. Back in the 1980s, all my local library had was one shitty book about Fortran.

To be fair, it might have been a very good book about Fortran. But still... FORTRAN!
Tue, 09 Feb 2016, 09:21
Dabz
Took one look at Fartron, and thought "Neeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrr"

I'm the same with Pascal, didnt like it, which is probably why I never took to Cobra BASIC as it seemed Pascal'ly.

Blitz, GLBasic and any of the C's (C/C++/C#, Vala <--- Last one is C# like)... Me, done!

Dabz

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Intel Core i5 6400 2.7GHz, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (8GB), 8Gig DDR4 RAM, 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD, Windows 10 64bit
Tue, 09 Feb 2016, 09:43
steve_ancell
I was lucky, there were quite a few geeks at my high school so I learned a fair bit at the time. What I did learn wasn't exactly advanced but it was enough to get animations and stuff into simple games, plus it came in handy when me and a couple of other kids made an animation of a hand pulling a wanker gesture and loaded it onto shitloads of school computers. It was enough to make the headmaster have a moan up during morning assembly. They never did find out who dunnit, it was just me and my two mates knew; good thing no grasses saw us doing it.
Tue, 09 Feb 2016, 09:49
steve_ancell
How the school staff worked out that it was so obscene really puzzles me though, it was rather blocky and looked quite crap in my opinion.
Tue, 09 Feb 2016, 10:16
Jayenkai
In those days EVERYTHING was blocky and looked crap!
But then the players used to have imaginations, too.

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Tue, 09 Feb 2016, 14:22
cyangames
I still have a couple of usborne book about to this day, just because y'know. They were classy books

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Web / Game Dev, occasionally finishes off coding games also!
Tue, 09 Feb 2016, 14:49
steve_ancell
Jayenkai In those days EVERYTHING was blocky and looked crap!

Ah but there was crap and there was my crap, trust me the latter was the worse.
Tue, 09 Feb 2016, 15:09
therevillsgames
My local library had coding books for the Spectrum ... great, but I had an Amstrad!

I still tried the code listings though, sometimes they still worked...
Fri, 12 Feb 2016, 06:41
Jayenkai
Making Of : https://bit.ly/1PwMds5
Thu, 27 Jul 2023, 03:47
Jayenkai
I was reminded of the wonderful Usborne Coding books, yesterday, and was showing one to Mum, this morning.

PDFs for a whole bunch of them.

I was showing Mum the "Better Basic" one.
It starts off with an introduction to Basic, how to type things in with the keyboard, a few simple commands like print and input, then by page 18 (Eighteen!) it's doing Multi-dimensional arrays and databases.
Oh my fucking god, no wonder I grew up with such a thirst for coding.
We just don't get things like that any more, and I'd LOVE if we did.

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