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One of the seminal computer books, in its way as important as SICP and K&R.

I learned to program typing them in.

Hah! So we can add the author of Empire to the list of uncounted thousands (Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?) of curious minds instructed and inspired by Ahl's work.

Yes you can :-)

I spent a lot of time extending the Hammurabi program. My version of it is lost to history like a lot of my early stuff. I also wrote a lunar lander game, and an orbit game.

Empire was first written in Basic.

Same here — Hammurabi and King were what got me started writing games. I learned so much from experimenting with that core loop, and it got met interested in math, economics, and lots of other subjects. Fur Trader, Civil War, and Combat also.

I learned a similar way - from typing in programs from magazines like Compute!’s Gazette.

I have a friend who writes decent poetry. I asked him how he learned it. He laughed, and said he started by just copying existing poems to send to his girlfriend. Then he began modifying and customizing the poems. Then he just wrote his own.

And so it goes, for most any skill.

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