A little more than 20 years ago, I was getting my first taste of programming on my brother's Commodore 64. The only information available to me were a few books my brother had that contained code listings, written in BASIC, for a bunch of computer games. It was all the information I had available to me at the time. I must've read and re-read those books a million times...
About 15 years ago, I rediscovered the joy of programming and began looking at, and buying (when I could afford them), whatever books and magazines I could get my hands on at the local computer store that covered computer programming. Aside from the library, I didn't have many other avenues for information on the field of software development. And since going to college was a decidedly expense avenue for me at the time, these were my only options for learning.
Today -- after upgrading my Safari Books account a few weeks ago -- I now have immediate access to every book currently in their library, which has a total count of books somewhere in the 8,000 range, last I checked, and includes just about every book on software development that I might ever want to read.
And even when I can't find what I'm looking for on there, I have Amazon.com as backup for cases where the book I want isn't available via my Safari account.
And on top of that I have The Web/Internet, with any answer to just about any question I could think of being a mere Google away...
Technology is so cool sometimes...
Erm... the C64 came with a programmer manual. It may not have covered all the tweaks, but it had code examples for graphics and music. Got you up and running in no time.
ReplyDeleteImagine my irritation when i got my first (expensive) PC and all it had was a bloated book explaining how to use menus of the MS-DOS command "edit" and the likes.
Yeah I vaguely remember the programmer manual, which I'm pretty sure I looked at extensively. My brother had a few other books as well, from what I remember. I spent so much time writing out BASIC code on that thing...was a lot of fun.
ReplyDeleteMy brother's C64, and all the the manuals and software he had for it are actually still sitting at our parents' house currently packed away somewhere. I should take a look at that stuff again sometime...I loved that system.