Same issue for me on the questions. I could see from the Spectrum 48k manual that there was more that could be done than writing plain BASIC but didn’t know how to find out more. I didn’t have any idea what all those POKES I saw in others’ code (typed in from magazines) were doing.

Same issue when I got a BBC B. No reference beyond the simple user guide, and I couldn’t find anything out about other books that might be available by asking at the library, because they didn’t understand what I was asking about.

Getting onto the Internet in 1994 made a huge difference!