Brilliant! This brought some old feelings come flooding back - especially the link to those Usbourne books, I'd forgotten about them, I definitely had a couple of those.
The author's experience pretty much matches my own formative experience with a ZX Spectrum, from Basic to Z80 Machine Code. But then I kind of stopped and did other stuff for a few years. Now I'm a front-end dev for my sins. BASIC and Z80 Assembler is much much simpler than all the crazy abstractions one works with these days!
I think I had the space games one. I remember keying in the moonlander game. What I found interesting was the feelings it stirred in me. I 'remembered' in an emotional way what it was like to be 10 years old and keying in BASIC programs from books and magazines.
One of the other things I remember doing was drawing a pattern of lines radiating out from the centre of the screen. The spacing between the lines would interfere with the video rendering and you'd get lovely moire patterns. Varying the space between the lines would change the pattern.
The author's experience pretty much matches my own formative experience with a ZX Spectrum, from Basic to Z80 Machine Code. But then I kind of stopped and did other stuff for a few years. Now I'm a front-end dev for my sins. BASIC and Z80 Assembler is much much simpler than all the crazy abstractions one works with these days!