05-16-2022, 06:44 PM
My friends and I got into computers in high school. The room with all the microcomputers also had all of the beginner-oriented manuals that came with the machines, so we lucked out at the beginning.
The school required students to learn Fortran & Cobol on its old mainframe before moving on to Basic. Meanwhile, we bootstrapped ourselves into Basic and Z80 assembly language on the school's TRS-80s.
My first purchase was either one of those low-cost Tab books with a gazillion Basic programs to type in, or... Fast Basic by George Gratzer. That book is about using machine language subroutines to improve the performance of interpreted TRS-80 Basic programs, but that small book was PACKED with low-level information about those machines. Ounce-for-ounce that may be the single most informative and useful microcomputer book I've ever owned.
The school required students to learn Fortran & Cobol on its old mainframe before moving on to Basic. Meanwhile, we bootstrapped ourselves into Basic and Z80 assembly language on the school's TRS-80s.
My first purchase was either one of those low-cost Tab books with a gazillion Basic programs to type in, or... Fast Basic by George Gratzer. That book is about using machine language subroutines to improve the performance of interpreted TRS-80 Basic programs, but that small book was PACKED with low-level information about those machines. Ounce-for-ounce that may be the single most informative and useful microcomputer book I've ever owned.