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One of my early favorites was Donald Alcock's Illustrating BASIC

https://books.google.com/books/about/Illustrating_BASIC.html...

It's entirely hand-lettered. The author's afterword remarks that an attentive reader will notice the shakier lettering toward the end of the book.

He wrote a couple other books on programming (I think he did Illustrating Pascal). It's a quirky approach, but very friendly and unintimidating compared to vanilla textbooks.

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I came here to ask if anyone could remember this weird handlettered book on BASIC which illustrated all kinds of concepts including linked lists using arrays of boxes and arrows. I believe this must have been it unless there’s another book that was like this. I vividly remember as a kid reading all these different books about computers and programming. I found that I had to read a bunch of books in order to find the right mix of explanations that gelled in my mind. Instead of reading one or two books on BASIC and getting frustrated, I probably read a dozen. This one really appealed to my visual brain.

It's also on Archive.org. I went there to check it out. Very nice.

https://archive.org/details/cambridge-university-press-illus...

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