Classic Usborne Computer Science Books/Comics as PDFs | Hacker News Reader

Classic Usborne Computer Science Books/Comics as PDFs

usborne.com

121 pointsdirectionless21 comments

I really wish more publishers openly took the approach "we're not monetizing this anymore, here it is for free". It would help combat the damage of our extended copyright terms a lot.

> Scroll down to download free copies of the Usborne 1980s computer books. NB these programs don't work on modern computers.

This is sad to read when there are ways to make them run on modern computers! You'd still have to type the listings though (unless someone OCR'd them all...).

I used to have a copy of the Space Games book, I picked it up at a jumble sale as a student so it was a bit after my days hacking BASIC at home. It was still a fun read, I'll grab a copy when I get home.

As has been mentioned there are emulators for many early BASICs, but honestly the basic algorithms and concepts should be pretty easy to apply in something more modern, like Python or VB.NET my kids are learning at school.

Indeed. For anyone interested, PC-BASIC might scratch the BASIC-on-modern-hardware itch:

http://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/

From the docs [0]:

"PC-BASIC is a free, cross-platform interpreter for GW-BASIC, Advanced BASIC (BASICA), PCjr Cartridge Basic and Tandy 1000 GWBASIC. It interprets these BASIC dialects with a high degree of accuracy, aiming for bug-for-bug compatibility. PC-BASIC emulates the most common video and audio hardware on which these BASICs used to run. PC-BASIC runs plain-text, tokenised and protected .BAS files...."

[0] http://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/doc/2.0/

Or you could try GLBasic.com, a BASIC dialect that is cross platform compileable and fast. Has 3D capabilities too.

Is it compatible with the code in the books that we’re talking about?

These books look like a great piece of computing history as well as something that would be fun to try out today.

Seems like it would be easy to link to web pages with emulators for the older systems (or perhaps a simple BASIC emulator) in javascript.

Better yet, they could host emulators themselves along with instructions on how to use them with the books!

(They could also collaborate with the Internet Archive, which has an extensive historical computing and emulation collection.)

A very little bit of poking around on the web turned up PC Basic at https://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/ which should be usable for a lot of the simple exercises. At least this one from https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTUzdWckVpSUlIb0E...:

    LIST                                                                            
    10 LET A$="***"                                                                 
    20 FOR J = 1 TO 7                                                               
    30  PRINT TAB(J);A$                                                             
    40 NEXT J                                                                       
    50 FOR K=1 TO 3                                                                 
    60 PRINT TAB(J+1);A$                                                            
    70 NEXT K                                                                       
    80 FOR L = 7 TO 1 STEP -1                                                       
    90 PRINT TAB(L);A$                                                              
    100 NEXT L                                                                      
    Ok

works perfectly.

I rather like this way of working, define a bit of program, try it out, refine it, try again without having to either compile or switch context from editor to command line.

Edit: formatting.

They'll work at the command prompt on a Raspberry Pi running RISC OS Pico!

s/NB these programs don't work on modern computers/NB these programs work well with BBC BASIC on a modern Raspberry Pi computer running RISC OS!/

Would you like me to OCR them all? Where should I upload the TXT versions?

The book on Programming Tricks and Skills is about development process and software architecture as well as language-specific stuff, and the advice in that holds up pretty well today!

I had a C64 but no software, so I had to make my own by typing out the code from these books by hand. I love them though be warned that the programs are much simpler than the covers would lead one to believe.

When I was done, I realized I knew how to code basic. No one had to explain loops or goto or if after you type it in a few times.

I will add that OCR is not going to help you because a lot of the code was PEEK and POKE. I suppose your basic interpreter could also emulate the C64 memory space.

Yup. I grew up in a solidly blue collar household that didn’t have much money to spare. We got a Vic-20 at a garage sale, and I learned how to program by borrowing these books from the public library. Eventually we upgraded to an XT that came with GWBasic and I was blown away by how much more I could do (640kB of RAM! I can do anything!)

Presumably you would do these projects today on an emulator like VICE?

http://vice-emu.sourceforge.net/

These are really well written guides. They are more readable and enjoyable to read than many programming books published for adults today.

I've often wondered why programming books don't use simple graphics or diagrams to illustrate programming concepts. Anyone writing a technical guide (of any kind) would benefit from reading these as a source of ideas and inspiration.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11051095

Interesting. I've got several friends and family that "sell" Usborne books. I always figured it was just some MLM scam and always just told them no thank you when they tried to give me a catalog or a link to their really-long-url-with-numbers.sales.usborne.com page. But they actually look like a decent company. I'm kind of embarrassed now.

Not sure of their business model or their quality now, but content wise they were definitely a decent company. I grew up learning to code with their books about 30 years ago and they were great books, really made with care. An almost heroic effort given the niche market for that at the time.

A great find. I remember having Machine Code for Beginners (IIRC) which I got after learning some BASIC. I think it put me off machine code for several years as it seemed to go on and on about how difficult machine code was. (It is/was, but some encouragemet would have helped).

I used to get these books out of the library when I was about 8 years old. Unfortunately the code often wouldn't work as I was attempting to use the BASIC interpreter on my IBM XT. I never understood why but those PEEK and POKEs can't have helped...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com