

What Was Your First Coding Book? - RawData
http://www.flatplanetmedia.com/what-was-your-first-coding-book.html

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ajuc
C64 manual in German (I only knew Polish then). I typed some of the programs
into the computer, and played with changing the values.

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.

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Danieru
The first one I finished was The Mythical Man Month. At the time, high school,
I doubted if I was good enough for programming. So I started reading through
Jeff Atwood's recommended books:
[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/02/recommended-
reading...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/02/recommended-reading-for-
developers.html)

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.

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znmeb
Oh, man ... you're probably going to be sorry you asked, but here it is - my
first coding book:

[http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/univOfIllinoisUrbana/illiac/ILL...](http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/univOfIllinoisUrbana/illiac/ILLIAC/ILLIAC_programming_Sep56.pdf)

~~~
RawData
ha, that's awesome!

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mbreese
PCBoard Programming Langage Manual (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCBoard>)

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).

------
Ogre
60 Problems You Can Solve in BASIC, or something close to that. It was orange.
Google doesn't know about it.

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.

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zallarak
My situation was a little different as I got serious about programming when I
was 23, a year ago. The first real book I read was SICP (I had done learn
python the hard way by Zed Shaw right before that, but it's more a set of
exercises than a book); a friend who I met through HN strongly recommended it.
It was awesome and I loved it.

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

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madrona
One of those C64 books that goes from "how to plug in cables and switch the
computer on" all the way to tweaking memory values with PEEK and POKE. I read
that when I was 6 and loved it. Now, computer books and manuals have a tiny
fraction of the scope, and yet they _still_ considered too complicated for
many full-grown adults.

~~~
RawData
Ahhh PEEK and POKE...yep.

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beefsack
My first book was an awesomely illustrated games programming book for BASIC
that my dad gave me when I was around 7 or 8.

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.

------
thomaslee
Not strictly a book, but this made something "click" for me back in the early
days: <http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/oop/oop1.htm>

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/>

------
pan69
My first programming book was about GW-BASIC, it was red and very thick. But
it was the second book that I bought that was the book that made me want to
become a programmer:

Mastering Turbo Assembler by Tom Swan

[http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Turbo-Assembler-Tom-
Swan/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Turbo-Assembler-Tom-
Swan/dp/B001J2WK5G/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1342159724&sr=8-2&keywords=turbo+assembler+tom+swan)

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

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bcowcher
My first coding book was c++ in 21days (HAH!). It did cover the basics pretty
well but it took me a long time before the abstraction of objects really sunk
in and templates I don't think we're especially well covered.

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.

------
ecubed
[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Awesome-Game-Creation-Programming-
Re...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Awesome-Game-Creation-Programming-
Required/dp/1886801487)

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.

------
jordonwii
Does HTML/CSS count? If so, then mine was "Head First (X)HTML and CSS". It was
an awesome book that really managed to get me excited about the subject. That
ended up being my gateway into JS, PHP, Python, etc.

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

~~~
RawData
I really like the head first books...I've got a couple of them too.

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evincarofautumn
“Peter Norton’s Assembly Language Book for the IBM PC”, a handmedown or yard
sale find or something. It inspired an early interest in OS development and a
few mid-teen years of booting My Very Own OS off a floppy on my middle
school’s computers. Compilers and games have since seduced me back into
userland, though.

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wyclif
_Structured BASIC_ by Clark and Drum. Copyright 1983. It's still in print! I
was on the TI-99>C64>Amiga>IBM PC trajectory.
<http://c2.bibtopia.com/h/662/306/73306662.0.m.jpg>

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RawData
You should see this thing, dog-eared, warn out...but still kicking! Even
though it's not very useful anymore, I wouldn't sell this book for anything in
the world _lol_

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

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grannyg00se
Tricks Of The MS-DOS Masters. I remember the guy at the computer store telling
me not to bother because "in ten years we'll be speaking regular english to
computers.". Fantastic book though. Glad I didn't take his advice.

------
radley
"Your Atari Computer"

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/25457150/Your-Atari-Computer-A-
Gui...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/25457150/Your-Atari-Computer-A-Guide-to-
Atari-400-800-Personal-Computers)

------
aantix
I use to have a subscription to 3-2-1 Contact as a kid. The had these short
one or two line programs in the back. I think there was an Apple magazine
called Nibbles that had something similar.

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agotterer
Teach yourself Visual Basic in 24 hours.

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

~~~
ecubed
I always found those "in 24 hours" books to be amusing in that there was no
way in hell you were going to work through a book that size in 24 hours

------
joezydeco
Apple ][ BASIC Programming Manual. The green spiral-bound one with the groovy
Atari George Opperman style cover. Integer BASIC of course. AppleSoft BASIC
hadn't come out yet.

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MaysonL
[http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Fortran/10...](http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Fortran/102653993.05.01.acc.pdf)

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phil
[http://books.google.com/books/about/Programming_in_MacScheme...](http://books.google.com/books/about/Programming_in_MacScheme.html?id=vR2GAAAAIAAJ)

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slurgfest
Hmm, this is currently down: Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 1310720)
(tried to allocate 19456 bytes) in /home/jps/public_html/wp-includes/wp-db.php
on line 597

~~~
RawData
yeah, server crashed under the weight of hackernews...working with tech to try
to patch up a solution :-(

EDIT: Upgraded my hosting plan a couple notches and tech support is monitoring
memory usage. Hopefully that takes care of things...

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michaelbuckbee
It wasn't a book, but I clearly remember sitting around with my dad and typing
in games from magazines (they would just list the source code on a couple
pages).

~~~
RawData
OH YEAH! I did that too! Oh man I forgot about those magazines...what where
they called..."Ahoy" Magazine or something like that for the old Commodore 64
mags...yeah yeah :-P

~~~
michaelbuckbee
We had an Apple IIe so it probably wasn't Ahoy, 'BitPower' or something goofy.

~~~
RawData
I remember my grandmother worked in a comic book factory and she used to swipe
a couple different computer magazines for me that they printed there...loved
those things!

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kleiba
Mine was actually similar: <http://www.lemon64.com/manual/>

(except it was the dead tree edition)

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portlander12345
The Macintosh C Programming Primer. It was fantastic: I highly recommend it
if, by some strange chance, you have occasion to program System 7.

------
rshm
Java: The Complete Reference, 96 edition

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

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antidoh
It must have been a Pascal book, but the first one I remember was K&R.

~~~
RawData
I'm reading that one right now...

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bkw
TRS-80 basic manual. That sucker's looong gone.

------
kamechan
itty bitty bytes of space for the commodore 64.

