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That's where I got started, copying basic code from the back of Boy's Life magazine, before I had a modem. I'm sure I'm not the only one here!

I learned BASIC from those Usborne books on it, muddling my way through with qbasic. The PDFs of them are actually available on their site now!

holy shit, thanks for the tip! I also learned programming from those usborne books, using qbasic (The dragon32 ran a version of microsoft basic, so the code for it was generally quite compatible with qbasic).

I'll go download them all for archiving.

Here's the link for the record https://usborne.com/us/books/computer-and-coding-books

I tried to use the wayback machine version, but it didn't cache the PDFs right since I guess they're hosted on a public Google Drive

thanks, got a local copy of all of them

That's how I started programming as a kid! There even were a few sample games.

I remember in Win98 it being hidden in the Windows folder, if you didn’t know where and what to look for, it was pretty much impossible to find.

Debug.exe still shipped in Win7 x86.