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

[minemcg@mastodon.social]

@paco
I'm sure I still have the physical book somewhere. Came with a small booklet with codes. Wonder where in my storage it could be along with my stiffies and floppies with drives that still work.
Be safe

[lcamtuf@infosec.exchange]

@paco I mean, No Starch has two or three assembly books in their catalog?

[linux_mclinuxface@fosstodon.org]

@paco I had that book!

[shanecelis@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@paco Wow, the PDF is available! For that and many other books in a similar vein. Browsing through I’m struck by how colorful and inviting it is. Some real care went into this.

[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