Usborne books

I remember these books from when I was growing up and learning to program. Now they’re free! Most of them have BBC/Electron listings so I imagine that the bulk of the code will work in RISC OS BASIC too.

Edit: Now that I’ve had a change to open up a couple and look at them… wow, we were writing unintelligible gibberish back then! One-character variable names and the like, not to mention branching by line number…

Excellent! These’ll make a great read, thanks for linking to them. I’m a little too young to have encountered these originally.

About the one character variable names wasn’t that about saving as much space as possible?

It’s probably more about making them work with as many different systems as possible. I looked through the space games one yesterday and found the programs are really trivial in nature with limited use, but I suppose for the age group originally aimed at, and to be multi-platform compatible, that would always be a limitation.

It’s probably more about making them work with as many different systems as possible.

Correct. I had the misfortune of having a TI-99/4A as my first computer, and its version of BASIC was rather limited – only one expression per line, no multi-line if-then, no proper named functions/procedures (you could ‘DEF’ a one-statement function), no integer variable type, etc. I remember having trouble getting quite a few programs in the Usborne books to work. (It also didn’t help that the TI-99 was one of the true horror stories of early home computer hardware design – a good 16-bit CPU shoehorned into an 8-bit computer, with the end result that the BASIC interpreter was itself written in an interpreted language – so even something like using CLS to clear the character-based screen would take several seconds. Wikipedia has a good article on the machine)