What Was Your First Coding Book?

I remember to this day that graphic programs using sprites didn't worked for me (must have been some print error in manual, I've tried like 100 times to run that program - it was supposed to draw baloon, but it just did nothing).

Then I got huge red book "Mikrokomputery" by Herwig Feichtinger from my father. It had schematics and opcodes for Z80 and 6502, listings of commands with short explanation for a dozen variants of basic, pascal, forth and c, commands for CP\M and DOS, and some nice algorithms (drawing circle pixel by pixel, questions and answers program in basic using "learning" decision tree, some utilities to format a disk, etc). And it was in Polish (translated from German I think), so this was the first programming book I could understand.

It was not until I came across Jeff Atwood's fizz buzz post that I started to belief I could program.

The Mythical Man Month opened up my eyes to the fundamental difficulty of programming. In contrast to the typo based difficulty I was going through at the time.

Thus between Man Month and Jeff Atwood I determined that I was capable of programming and that it would be a challenge worth pursuing.

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/univOfIllinoisUrbana/illiac/ILL...

In the early 90s I ran a small BBS from my bedroom. I had used a bit of BASIC, but programming doors for my BBS was my first actual programming. I just got rid of the book recently. Because of this start, I got the bug to start coding for real. After this, I migrated to the more traditional C++, but I still have fond memories of writing extensions for my BBS. (Not that I had many visitors... it was more just for fun).

My dad paid me a dollar for each one I solved. I think I did about 40 of them. Now that I think about it, that was also my first paid programming job.

Edit: Those giant Creative Computing books full of BASIC games might have actually been before that, but that 60 Problems one was the first that was explicitly about learning to code.

EDIT: It's free online: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

It had a number of games in each book, and they provided the entire source for the game in text on the pages that you could type into the computer and play the game. Each game had great illustrations and had an explanation of the game itself.

The next logical step for me was to start hacking away at the games, first changing variables to modify the game, and eventually writing my own simple games.

I'm a full time developer now and I owe a lot to my dad and to those books. I've been completely unable to find information on the books, and would love to get some copies of them now. If anyone knows the names of these books and / or where to get them, I would absolutely love to hear.

Sadly the author passed away in 1999 -- when he was younger than I am now & just a few years after I first read his "book". IIRC his parents were still trying to get the book published for a while.

Looks like his family maintains a web site in his memory: http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/

Mastering Turbo Assembler by Tom Swan

http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Turbo-Assembler-Tom-Swan/dp/...

My copy actually looks very similar to the one on Amazon. :)

I probably bit off more than I could chew at the time, but I stuck with it because I was so hellbent on game programming. I didn't end up in game dev, but I think I became a better developer after spending so much time with a low level language.

Learned a click-based "programming" method called The Games Factory through this book when I was 11 I think. Ever since then I've been hooked on tech/programming.

And yes, that was relatively recently (only about 4-5 years ago), which dramatically reduces the cool/nostalgia factor there.

Do you remember your first programming book, or have a particular favorite?

http://www.scribd.com/doc/25457150/Your-Atari-Computer-A-Gui...

Cover: http://www.treasuretess.co.uk/images/Sams_VB5.jpg

(except it was the dead tree edition)

Finished this book twice before coding a single line of java.