OMG. Can you imagine publishing Machine Code for Beginners today??

[nuclearoatmeal@beige.party]

@paco

That and some of the other books on that site were nostalgic. Never read then specifically, but yeah, definitely the right time for the time.

[overeducatedredneck@bitbang.social]

@paco possibly not as charmingly illustrated, but the modern equivalent is the RISC-V ISA Manual: https://docs.riscv.org/reference/isa/_attachments/riscv-unprivileged.pdf

RISC-V was developed as a teaching tool initially, and that's still a part of its purpose and it's reflected in the documentation. It's very approachable.

[dan@mastodon.durrans.com]

@paco Imagine how many libraries you'd need to pull from npm to get your dev environment set up for this!

[boydstephensmithjr@hachyderm.io]

@paco Those robots "taught" me how to write games for the Apple ][c

[mikebabcock@floss.social]

@paco have you seen the for babies series by Chris Ferrie? Saw him give a talk at the #Toronto science center on #quantum physics and he'd just also written these quantum physics for babies board books as well.
We've been giving them to friends who have babies ever since.
See: https://a.co/d/02pxpg9V

[eestileib@tech.lgbt]

@msh @paco

Hand typing a code listing from a magazine develops useful working memory!

[dp0@mastodon.social]

@paco Most "coders" these days are even overwhelmed by the "complexity" of low-level programming languages ... and for whom even high level languages are too complex: HELLO VIBE CODING.

Guess which programming languages rank among the top 10 of the most popular languages to "vibe code" in ... Python, JavaScript, and Java ...

[gimulnautti@mastodon.green]

@paco Could you believe we had no problems expecting humans could write machine code, just for fun?

[toriver@mas.to]

@muddle @paco Sure the illustration only has Z80 instructions, but I will instead ask why not also the poor Motorola 6809? The Dragon series of home computers did after all sell a decent number though not close to the other brands that used the other two CPUs.

[verbgarden@ohai.social]

@shanecelis @paco The early 80s was truly a golden age for seriously engaging educational books.

[glasspusher@beige.party]

@paco I had a similar book for the zx81 in the early 1980s!

[roger_w_@fosstodon.org]

@paco Kudos to Usborne for making them available, we might run faster computers, but the fundamentals of electronics and making stuff haven't changed AT ALL. You can still buy a 555 timer chip, discrete components, everything. Even a Z80 micro although the original Z80 chips are no longer made.

How to Make Computer Model Controllers is just as relevant today owing to Raspberry Pi's making control computing affordable.

[biglinter@mastodon.social]

@paco do you remember the last time "beginners" ment actual "peoples beginning their journey in being educated into something"?

todays "beginner" means vibe coding for as little money as possible.

[bitchboss@marcella.masto.host]

@paco

Spent half my life on a 6502c but nobody wants to hear...

[wouter@pleroma.debian.social]

@paco
Just skimmed through it.

I would have loved a book like that growing up. As it is, some of the stuff covered in it I only learned about when going to college, years later.

I would have been of the right age to get this book! Alas, it doesn't seem to be available in Dutch though. Plus, I only got my first computer (a C-128 hand me down) in the mid 90s...

[rebootdeluxe@infosec.exchange]

@eestileib ...and helps learning and practicing debugging a lot!

In my youth I made the experience that almost every code in a magazine had errors. 🤬

@msh @paco

[umurgdk@mastodon.social]

@paco oh this cover design

[luc0x61@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@paco I learnt Z80 assembly code first from instructions seen in listings, and then in Rodnay Zaks "Programming the Z80" book.
By that time we were learning more about thelow level basics, developing was more complex sometimes.
The level of abstraction of today gives a lot of flexibility, but at the same time astrays from the waste of resources: memory space, computing power, energy waste, even for terribly simple applications.

[martinrust@infosec.exchange]

@msh @paco "every kid" is a bit exaggerated, isn't it? But I agree to your point.

[gevoel@mastodon.green]

@paco
Nice. The closest to the machine programming I ever did was in assembler. Only a very little bit. Around 1987