4 ms·

What Was Your First Coding Book?

18 points by RawData 14y ago

radley 14y ago
"Your Atari Computer" http://www.scribd.com/doc/25457150/Your-Atari-Computer-A-Guide-to-Atari-400-800-Personal-Computers http://www.scribd.com/doc/25457150/Your-Atari-Computer-A-Gui...
jordonwii 14y ago
Does HTML/CSS count? If so, then mine was "Head First (X)HTML and CSS". It was an awesome book that really managed to get me excited about the subject. That ended up being my gateway into JS, PHP, Python, etc. And yes, that was relatively recently (only about 4-5 years ago), which dramatically reduces the cool/nostalgia factor there.
- RawData 14y ago
  I really like the head first books...I've got a couple of them too.
aantix 14y ago
I use to have a subscription to 3-2-1 Contact as a kid. The had these short one or two line programs in the back. I think there was an Apple magazine called Nibbles that had something similar.
kleiba 14y ago
Mine was actually similar: http://www.lemon64.com/manual/ http://www.lemon64.com/manual/ (except it was the dead tree edition)
agotterer 14y ago
Teach yourself Visual Basic in 24 hours. Cover: http://www.treasuretess.co.uk/images/Sams_VB5.jpg http://www.treasuretess.co.uk/images/Sams_VB5.jpg
- ecubed 14y ago
  I always found those "in 24 hours" books to be amusing in that there was no way in hell you were going to work through a book that size in 24 hours
- edwinnathaniel 14y ago
  Long time ago, SAMS books were one of the best out there (lack of competition).
grannyg00se 14y ago
Tricks Of The MS-DOS Masters. I remember the guy at the computer store telling me not to bother because "in ten years we'll be speaking regular english to computers.". Fantastic book though. Glad I didn't take his advice.
Ogre 14y ago
60 Problems You Can Solve in BASIC, or something close to that. It was orange. Google doesn't know about it. My dad paid me a dollar for each one I solved. I think I did about 40 of them. Now that I think about it, that was also my first paid programming job. Edit: Those giant Creative Computing books full of BASIC games might have actually been before that, but that 60 Problems one was the first that was explicitly about learning to code.
madrona 14y ago
One of those C64 books that goes from "how to plug in cables and switch the computer on" all the way to tweaking memory values with PEEK and POKE. I read that when I was 6 and loved it. Now, computer books and manuals have a tiny fraction of the scope, and yet they still considered too complicated for many full-grown adults.
- RawData 14y ago
  Ahhh PEEK and POKE...yep.
slurgfest 14y ago
Hmm, this is currently down: Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 1310720) (tried to allocate 19456 bytes) in /home/jps/public_html/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 597
- RawData 14y ago
  yeah, server crashed under the weight of hackernews...working with tech to try to patch up a solution :-( EDIT: Upgraded my hosting plan a couple notches and tech support is monitoring memory usage. Hopefully that takes care of things...
rshm 14y ago
Java: The Complete Reference, 96 edition Finished this book twice before coding a single line of java.
beefsack 14y ago
My first book was an awesomely illustrated games programming book for BASIC that my dad gave me when I was around 7 or 8. It had a number of games in each book, and they provided the entire source for the game in text on the pages that you could type into the computer and play the game. Each game had great illustrations and had an explanation of the game itself. The next logical step for me was to start hacking away at the games, first changing variables to modify the game, and eventually writing my own simple games. I'm a full time developer now and I owe a lot to my dad and to those books. I've been completely unable to find information on the books, and would love to get some copies of them now. If anyone knows the names of these books and / or where to get them, I would absolutely love to hear.
mbreese 14y ago
PCBoard Programming Langage Manual (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCBoard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCBoard) In the early 90s I ran a small BBS from my bedroom. I had used a bit of BASIC, but programming doors for my BBS was my first actual programming. I just got rid of the book recently. Because of this start, I got the bug to start coding for real. After this, I migrated to the more traditional C++, but I still have fond memories of writing extensions for my BBS. (Not that I had many visitors... it was more just for fun).
thomaslee 14y ago
Not strictly a book, but this made something "click" for me back in the early days: http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/oop/oop1.htm http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/oop/oop1.htm Sadly the author passed away in 1999 -- when he was younger than I am now & just a few years after I first read his "book". IIRC his parents were still trying to get the book published for a while. Looks like his family maintains a web site in his memory: http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/ http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/
wyclif 14y ago
Structured BASIC by Clark and Drum. Copyright 1983. It's still in print! I was on the TI-99>C64>Amiga>IBM PC trajectory. http://c2.bibtopia.com/h/662/306/73306662.0.m.jpg http://c2.bibtopia.com/h/662/306/73306662.0.m.jpg
joezydeco 14y ago
Apple ][ BASIC Programming Manual. The green spiral-bound one with the groovy Atari George Opperman style cover. Integer BASIC of course. AppleSoft BASIC hadn't come out yet.
zallarak 14y ago
My situation was a little different as I got serious about programming when I was 23, a year ago. The first real book I read was SICP (I had done learn python the hard way by Zed Shaw right before that, but it's more a set of exercises than a book); a friend who I met through HN strongly recommended it. It was awesome and I loved it. EDIT: It's free online: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/
phil 14y ago
http://books.google.com/books/about/Programming_in_MacScheme.html?id=vR2GAAAAIAAJ http://books.google.com/books/about/Programming_in_MacScheme...
Danieru 14y ago
The first one I finished was The Mythical Man Month. At the time, high school, I doubted if I was good enough for programming. So I started reading through Jeff Atwood's recommended books: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/02/recommended-reading-for-developers.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/02/recommended-reading... It was not until I came across Jeff Atwood's fizz buzz post that I started to belief I could program. The Mythical Man Month opened up my eyes to the fundamental difficulty of programming. In contrast to the typo based difficulty I was going through at the time. Thus between Man Month and Jeff Atwood I determined that I was capable of programming and that it would be a challenge worth pursuing.
kamechan 14y ago
itty bitty bytes of space for the commodore 64.
antidoh 14y ago
It must have been a Pascal book, but the first one I remember was K&R.
- RawData 14y ago
  I'm reading that one right now...
bcowcher 14y ago
My first coding book was c++ in 21days (HAH!). It did cover the basics pretty well but it took me a long time before the abstraction of objects really sunk in and templates I don't think we're especially well covered. I probably bit off more than I could chew at the time, but I stuck with it because I was so hellbent on game programming. I didn't end up in game dev, but I think I became a better developer after spending so much time with a low level language.
bkw 14y ago
TRS-80 basic manual. That sucker's looong gone.
pan69 14y ago
My first programming book was about GW-BASIC, it was red and very thick. But it was the second book that I bought that was the book that made me want to become a programmer: Mastering Turbo Assembler by Tom Swan http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Turbo-Assembler-Tom-Swan/dp/B001J2WK5G/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1342159724&sr=8-2&keywords=turbo+assembler+tom+swan http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Turbo-Assembler-Tom-Swan/dp/... My copy actually looks very similar to the one on Amazon. :)
portlander12345 14y ago
The Macintosh C Programming Primer. It was fantastic: I highly recommend it if, by some strange chance, you have occasion to program System 7.
voodoochilo 14y ago
6502 Assembly Language Programming, Lance Leventhal, 1981 ...an awful book.
ajuc 14y ago
C64 manual in German (I only knew Polish then). I typed some of the programs into the computer, and played with changing the values. I remember to this day that graphic programs using sprites didn't worked for me (must have been some print error in manual, I've tried like 100 times to run that program - it was supposed to draw baloon, but it just did nothing). Then I got huge red book "Mikrokomputery" by Herwig Feichtinger from my father. It had schematics and opcodes for Z80 and 6502, listings of commands with short explanation for a dozen variants of basic, pascal, forth and c, commands for CP\M and DOS, and some nice algorithms (drawing circle pixel by pixel, questions and answers program in basic using "learning" decision tree, some utilities to format a disk, etc). And it was in Polish (translated from German I think), so this was the first programming book I could understand.
ecubed 14y ago
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Awesome-Game-Creation-Programming-Required/dp/1886801487 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Awesome-Game-Creation-Programming-Re... Learned a click-based "programming" method called The Games Factory through this book when I was 11 I think. Ever since then I've been hooked on tech/programming.
RawData 14y ago
You should see this thing, dog-eared, warn out...but still kicking! Even though it's not very useful anymore, I wouldn't sell this book for anything in the world lol Do you remember your first programming book, or have a particular favorite?
michaelbuckbee 14y ago
It wasn't a book, but I clearly remember sitting around with my dad and typing in games from magazines (they would just list the source code on a couple pages).
- RawData 14y ago
  OH YEAH! I did that too! Oh man I forgot about those magazines...what where they called..."Ahoy" Magazine or something like that for the old Commodore 64 mags...yeah yeah :-P
  - michaelbuckbee 14y ago
    We had an Apple IIe so it probably wasn't Ahoy, 'BitPower' or something goofy.
    - RawData 14y ago
      I remember my grandmother worked in a comic book factory and she used to swipe a couple different computer magazines for me that they printed there...loved those things!
znmeb 14y ago
Oh, man ... you're probably going to be sorry you asked, but here it is - my first coding book: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/univOfIllinoisUrbana/illiac/ILLIAC/ILLIAC_programming_Sep56.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/univOfIllinoisUrbana/illiac/ILL...
- RawData 14y ago
  ha, that's awesome!
evincarofautumn 14y ago
“Peter Norton’s Assembly Language Book for the IBM PC”, a handmedown or yard sale find or something. It inspired an early interest in OS development and a few mid-teen years of booting My Very Own OS off a floppy on my middle school’s computers. Compilers and games have since seduced me back into userland, though.
MaysonL 14y ago
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Fortran/102653993.05.01.acc.pdf http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Fortran/10...

18 points by RawData 14y ago

"Your Atari Computer" http://www.scribd.com/doc/25457150/Your-Atari-Computer-A-Guide-to-Atari-400-800-Personal-Computers http://www.scribd.com/doc/25457150/Your-Atari-Computer-A-Gui...

jordonwii 14y ago

Does HTML/CSS count? If so, then mine was "Head First (X)HTML and CSS". It was an awesome book that really managed to get me excited about the subject. That ended up being my gateway into JS, PHP, Python, etc. And yes, that was relatively recently (only about 4-5 years ago), which dramatically reduces the cool/nostalgia factor there.

RawData 14y ago
I really like the head first books...I've got a couple of them too.

aantix 14y ago

I use to have a subscription to 3-2-1 Contact as a kid. The had these short one or two line programs in the back. I think there was an Apple magazine called Nibbles that had something similar.

kleiba 14y ago

Mine was actually similar: http://www.lemon64.com/manual/ http://www.lemon64.com/manual/ (except it was the dead tree edition)

agotterer 14y ago

Teach yourself Visual Basic in 24 hours. Cover: http://www.treasuretess.co.uk/images/Sams_VB5.jpg http://www.treasuretess.co.uk/images/Sams_VB5.jpg

ecubed 14y ago
I always found those "in 24 hours" books to be amusing in that there was no way in hell you were going to work through a book that size in 24 hours
edwinnathaniel 14y ago
Long time ago, SAMS books were one of the best out there (lack of competition).

grannyg00se 14y ago

Tricks Of The MS-DOS Masters. I remember the guy at the computer store telling me not to bother because "in ten years we'll be speaking regular english to computers.". Fantastic book though. Glad I didn't take his advice.

Ogre 14y ago

60 Problems You Can Solve in BASIC, or something close to that. It was orange. Google doesn't know about it. My dad paid me a dollar for each one I solved. I think I did about 40 of them. Now that I think about it, that was also my first paid programming job. Edit: Those giant Creative Computing books full of BASIC games might have actually been before that, but that 60 Problems one was the first that was explicitly about learning to code.

madrona 14y ago

One of those C64 books that goes from "how to plug in cables and switch the computer on" all the way to tweaking memory values with PEEK and POKE. I read that when I was 6 and loved it. Now, computer books and manuals have a tiny fraction of the scope, and yet they still considered too complicated for many full-grown adults.

RawData 14y ago
Ahhh PEEK and POKE...yep.

slurgfest 14y ago

Hmm, this is currently down: Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 1310720) (tried to allocate 19456 bytes) in /home/jps/public_html/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 597

RawData 14y ago
yeah, server crashed under the weight of hackernews...working with tech to try to patch up a solution :-( EDIT: Upgraded my hosting plan a couple notches and tech support is monitoring memory usage. Hopefully that takes care of things...

rshm 14y ago

Java: The Complete Reference, 96 edition Finished this book twice before coding a single line of java.

beefsack 14y ago

My first book was an awesomely illustrated games programming book for BASIC that my dad gave me when I was around 7 or 8. It had a number of games in each book, and they provided the entire source for the game in text on the pages that you could type into the computer and play the game. Each game had great illustrations and had an explanation of the game itself. The next logical step for me was to start hacking away at the games, first changing variables to modify the game, and eventually writing my own simple games. I'm a full time developer now and I owe a lot to my dad and to those books. I've been completely unable to find information on the books, and would love to get some copies of them now. If anyone knows the names of these books and / or where to get them, I would absolutely love to hear.

mbreese 14y ago

PCBoard Programming Langage Manual (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCBoard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCBoard) In the early 90s I ran a small BBS from my bedroom. I had used a bit of BASIC, but programming doors for my BBS was my first actual programming. I just got rid of the book recently. Because of this start, I got the bug to start coding for real. After this, I migrated to the more traditional C++, but I still have fond memories of writing extensions for my BBS. (Not that I had many visitors... it was more just for fun).

thomaslee 14y ago

Not strictly a book, but this made something "click" for me back in the early days: http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/oop/oop1.htm http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/oop/oop1.htm Sadly the author passed away in 1999 -- when he was younger than I am now & just a few years after I first read his "book". IIRC his parents were still trying to get the book published for a while. Looks like his family maintains a web site in his memory: http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/ http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/

wyclif 14y ago

Structured BASIC by Clark and Drum. Copyright 1983. It's still in print! I was on the TI-99>C64>Amiga>IBM PC trajectory. http://c2.bibtopia.com/h/662/306/73306662.0.m.jpg http://c2.bibtopia.com/h/662/306/73306662.0.m.jpg

joezydeco 14y ago

Apple ][ BASIC Programming Manual. The green spiral-bound one with the groovy Atari George Opperman style cover. Integer BASIC of course. AppleSoft BASIC hadn't come out yet.

zallarak 14y ago

My situation was a little different as I got serious about programming when I was 23, a year ago. The first real book I read was SICP (I had done learn python the hard way by Zed Shaw right before that, but it's more a set of exercises than a book); a friend who I met through HN strongly recommended it. It was awesome and I loved it. EDIT: It's free online: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

phil 14y ago

http://books.google.com/books/about/Programming_in_MacScheme.html?id=vR2GAAAAIAAJ http://books.google.com/books/about/Programming_in_MacScheme...

Danieru 14y ago

The first one I finished was The Mythical Man Month. At the time, high school, I doubted if I was good enough for programming. So I started reading through Jeff Atwood's recommended books: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/02/recommended-reading-for-developers.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/02/recommended-reading... It was not until I came across Jeff Atwood's fizz buzz post that I started to belief I could program. The Mythical Man Month opened up my eyes to the fundamental difficulty of programming. In contrast to the typo based difficulty I was going through at the time. Thus between Man Month and Jeff Atwood I determined that I was capable of programming and that it would be a challenge worth pursuing.

kamechan 14y ago

itty bitty bytes of space for the commodore 64.

antidoh 14y ago

It must have been a Pascal book, but the first one I remember was K&R.

RawData 14y ago
I'm reading that one right now...

bcowcher 14y ago

My first coding book was c++ in 21days (HAH!). It did cover the basics pretty well but it took me a long time before the abstraction of objects really sunk in and templates I don't think we're especially well covered. I probably bit off more than I could chew at the time, but I stuck with it because I was so hellbent on game programming. I didn't end up in game dev, but I think I became a better developer after spending so much time with a low level language.

bkw 14y ago

TRS-80 basic manual. That sucker's looong gone.

pan69 14y ago

My first programming book was about GW-BASIC, it was red and very thick. But it was the second book that I bought that was the book that made me want to become a programmer: Mastering Turbo Assembler by Tom Swan http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Turbo-Assembler-Tom-Swan/dp/B001J2WK5G/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1342159724&sr=8-2&keywords=turbo+assembler+tom+swan http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Turbo-Assembler-Tom-Swan/dp/... My copy actually looks very similar to the one on Amazon. :)

portlander12345 14y ago

The Macintosh C Programming Primer. It was fantastic: I highly recommend it if, by some strange chance, you have occasion to program System 7.

voodoochilo 14y ago

6502 Assembly Language Programming, Lance Leventhal, 1981 ...an awful book.

ajuc 14y ago

C64 manual in German (I only knew Polish then). I typed some of the programs into the computer, and played with changing the values. I remember to this day that graphic programs using sprites didn't worked for me (must have been some print error in manual, I've tried like 100 times to run that program - it was supposed to draw baloon, but it just did nothing). Then I got huge red book "Mikrokomputery" by Herwig Feichtinger from my father. It had schematics and opcodes for Z80 and 6502, listings of commands with short explanation for a dozen variants of basic, pascal, forth and c, commands for CP\M and DOS, and some nice algorithms (drawing circle pixel by pixel, questions and answers program in basic using "learning" decision tree, some utilities to format a disk, etc). And it was in Polish (translated from German I think), so this was the first programming book I could understand.

ecubed 14y ago

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Awesome-Game-Creation-Programming-Required/dp/1886801487 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Awesome-Game-Creation-Programming-Re... Learned a click-based "programming" method called The Games Factory through this book when I was 11 I think. Ever since then I've been hooked on tech/programming.

RawData 14y ago

You should see this thing, dog-eared, warn out...but still kicking! Even though it's not very useful anymore, I wouldn't sell this book for anything in the world lol Do you remember your first programming book, or have a particular favorite?

michaelbuckbee 14y ago

It wasn't a book, but I clearly remember sitting around with my dad and typing in games from magazines (they would just list the source code on a couple pages).

RawData 14y ago
OH YEAH! I did that too! Oh man I forgot about those magazines...what where they called..."Ahoy" Magazine or something like that for the old Commodore 64 mags...yeah yeah :-P
- michaelbuckbee 14y ago
  We had an Apple IIe so it probably wasn't Ahoy, 'BitPower' or something goofy.
  - RawData 14y ago
    I remember my grandmother worked in a comic book factory and she used to swipe a couple different computer magazines for me that they printed there...loved those things!

znmeb 14y ago

Oh, man ... you're probably going to be sorry you asked, but here it is - my first coding book: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/univOfIllinoisUrbana/illiac/ILLIAC/ILLIAC_programming_Sep56.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/univOfIllinoisUrbana/illiac/ILL...

RawData 14y ago
ha, that's awesome!

evincarofautumn 14y ago

“Peter Norton’s Assembly Language Book for the IBM PC”, a handmedown or yard sale find or something. It inspired an early interest in OS development and a few mid-teen years of booting My Very Own OS off a floppy on my middle school’s computers. Compilers and games have since seduced me back into userland, though.

MaysonL 14y ago

http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Fortran/102653993.05.01.acc.pdf http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Fortran/10...