Updating The Single Most Influential Book of the BASIC Era

I just want to mention another fantastic book which I think is related to the 2 at the top of this post. That book is: Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer

There is a link here: Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer

It really introduces one to how to structure the basic text adventure.
I started translating a few of these into javascript with some success.

I researched the author of the book, Tim Hartnell, but unfortunately he went
to the great computer lab in the sky some time ago. He seemed to really
live for computers and had infectious enthusiam.

RIP Tim.

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Thank you for all your contributions! I have donated $5,000 to Girls Who Code as promised:

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Probably the two most influential coding books in my early development where a book on Forth I read as a teenager and a book I read as a young child on programming Basic on my “Dick Smith Wizzard” (an australian version of the “VTech CreatiVision”, 4k with a basic cartrige and possibly the worst keyboard ever made by humanity), but that book had two things that I remember clearly. One was a dog balancing a ball on its nose, something that seemed evocative to my 8yo brain as to what I could achieve with a computer, and second an admonishment of “Nothing you type into the computer will hurt the computer! Its OK to make mistakes, you can fix them!”. It wasnt until I had learned how to destroy a C64 floppy drive 4-5 years later as a slightly malicious tween by POKEing invalid motor instructions that I learned this wasn’t entirely true, but for all purposes it was an important lesson because it taught me I had nothing to fear by being daring with my experiments. 40+ years later, I’m still at it. Somehow. Though occasionally wishing I had made playing the piano my primary focus instead of programming. Oh well.

Or maybe the dog with a ball on his nose was in the Forth book. Its all so long ago.

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