Just published : BASIC on Commodore book
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I can't believe that APress just published (Dec. 2018) this book. Amazon.com: Beginning Programming Using Retro Computing: Learn BASIC with a Commodore Emulator eBook: Gerald Friedland: Kindle Store[^]
Author says:
True story. I was looking for a system that would help 7-year olds teach themselves programming. Hey it's 2018, right? After looking through what's available, the two major issues that I have with the current tools are: 1) Many of them require the Internet (too dangerous for self learning) 2) most, if not all, of them are drag and drop. I wanted a non-distracting environment where the kids practice reading and writing while learning to program. The sensation of causing an action simply by typing a word is priceless.
I don't know. Maybe just use JavaScript in a browser to teach. It's much more relevant and has far fewer barriers to entry. I mean I would've really liked this book back in 1990 or before, but not sure this one will have a market.
I had to learn x86 assembly to detox from that old form of basic. It made learning modern languages difficult.
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Try again, my friend. JavaScript, as its namesake stands for is just a Scripting language akin to BASH and PowerShell. Yep, you can make it do great things, but with way too many caveats beginner wise. On the other hand, early 80s systems were complete development environments which presented themselves with no introduction and no serious booting (you can even run a commodore 64 in a browser). You were alone with the intro screen ``` *** COMMODORE 64 BASIC V2 *** 64K RAM SYSTEM 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE READY PLAYER ONE. ``` What else could you want in life :-D
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I had to learn x86 assembly to detox from that old form of basic. It made learning modern languages difficult.
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daflashrex wrote:
I had to learn x86 assembly to detox from that old form of basic. It made learning modern languages difficult.
That is very interesting. So assembly on commodore was really ugly then? How so?
It had already been a couple of decades by then so I didn't look at Commodores assembly.
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daflashrex wrote:
I had to learn x86 assembly to detox from that old form of basic. It made learning modern languages difficult.
That is very interesting. So assembly on commodore was really ugly then? How so?
I learned i386.