Those Old Programming Books

I was looking through some of my most treasured possessions recently: the original computer programming books that started my journey. I must have been about seven when I first cracked open those faded covers, not long after getting my first computer.

Even at that young age, I was fascinated by how programs worked and how code made computers do what I wanted. These books from the 1970s and 80s introduced me to BASIC, Pascal, and C. Simple by today's standards, but they opened a world of possibilities.

Finding those books again made me think about what's changed in how we teach programming—and what's been lost along the way.

Machines of a Different Era

As I paged through the books, I thought back to those early days spent coding on hulking machines with mere kilobytes of memory. Processors that today's smartphones would easily outpace.

But that old hardware is part of what made those early days so formative. With such limited resources, efficiency and optimization were everything. I learned to make every byte and every CPU cycle count.

That early training stuck with me throughout my career. Even as technology advanced by leaps and bounds, I never lost appreciation for elegant, tightly optimized code. Some techniques from those old books I still use today in one form or another.

The Books Themselves

These weren't glossy, full-color textbooks. They were dense, serious, often published by computer manufacturers or small technical presses. Cheap paper. Inconsistent typesetting. Hand-drawn diagrams.

And they were hard. Written for adults, by adults, with no concessions to young readers. No cartoons. No "fun projects." Just pure information about how computers worked.

I think that's why they worked so well for me. They didn't talk down to me. They assumed I could figure it out if I tried hard enough.

BASIC: Where It Started

BASIC was the gateway. Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. The name promised accessibility, and it delivered - sort of. The Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research documents how BASIC became the de facto programming language for home computer systems in the late 1970s.

Line numbers. GOTO statements. PRINT and INPUT. The first program everyone wrote:

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10

An infinite loop of greeting. Trivial by any standard. But when I typed that in and watched the screen fill with "HELLO WORLD" over and over, something shifted in my brain. I made the computer do that.

Pascal and C: Going Deeper

Pascal came next: structured programming, proper procedures and functions, type checking. No more spaghetti code with GOTOs everywhere. It taught me to think before I typed. The discipline of declaring types and organizing code into logical units felt like a revelation after BASIC's free-form chaos.

Then came C. Pointers. Memory allocation. Direct hardware access. C didn't protect you from yourself. You could write elegant, efficient code or crash the system with a misplaced asterisk. The power was terrifying and thrilling in equal measure.

I crashed a lot of systems. But C taught me what computers actually are at the hardware level. When things broke, no Stack Overflow to consult. Just the manual and persistence. That forced self-reliance built confidence that no tutorial could match.

A Letter to the Author

In early 2025, I tracked down one of the authors whose books shaped my early programming journey. I wrote to David Ahl, who published so many foundational BASIC books through Creative Computing. I told him how his books helped me learn when I was just a kid. How they didn't talk down to me. How they assumed I could figure it out if I put in the effort.

To my surprise, he wrote back. A personal reply from someone whose work shaped my entire career path. Knowing his intent was always to help students learn and develop real understanding, not just entertain with flashy examples, makes those books even more meaningful in retrospect. That foundation shaped entire careers, mine included. The investment he made in writing clear, challenging material paid dividends across generations of programmers. Technologizer ranks BASIC Computer Games among the most influential computer books ever published.

What Those Books Taught Me

Those dusty old tomes represent the beginnings of a lifelong journey. Whenever I flip through their dog-eared pages, I'm reminded of that sense of discovery and excitement programming first sparked in me.

• Precision matters. Computers do what you say, not what you mean.
• Efficiency isn't optional. When resources are limited, every byte counts.
• Fundamentals last. Languages change. Paradigms shift. Logic endures.
• Struggle teaches. Easy answers build shallow understanding.
• Curiosity compounds. Each thing learned makes the next thing easier.

I'll always be grateful I started my journey as a programmer in that minimalist era. It shaped me into the coder I am today and gave me foundations that still serve me well.

The Lost Art of Reading Source Code

Those old books had something modern programming education has abandoned: complete program listings. Twenty, thirty, sometimes fifty pages of commented source code you could study line by line. Not snippets. Not excerpts. Full working programs from top to bottom.

Learning Through Typing

I would trace through logic with a pencil, marking up margins with notes and questions. I'd type programs character by character, discovering through syntax errors where I'd misread a zero as the letter O. The tedium was the point. Each keystroke reinforced patterns until they became automatic.

When the program finally ran, I understood it completely. Not because someone explained it, but because I'd traced every logic path, debugged every typo, and watched the machine execute my keystrokes. The understanding was deep and permanent. Decades later, I still remember programs I typed in as a child.

What Modern Speed Costs

Today's developers copy-paste from Stack Overflow or let AI generate code. It's faster. But I wonder what's lost when you never type someone else's working code and figure out why it works. Pattern recognition from repetition can't be shortcut. The muscle memory of good code structure comes from writing it, not reading it.

I've watched the pendulum swing from "read and understand everything" to "generate and ship quickly." Maybe that's progress. But when I see developers who can't debug code they didn't write, who don't understand the systems they depend on, I think about those program listings. I think about what they built in me that tutorials and video courses never could.

There's something valuable about learning from books that expected more from you than you expected from yourself. Those manuals didn't know I was seven. They treated me like someone who wanted to understand, and so I became someone who did.

"They didn't talk down to me. They assumed I could figure it out if I tried hard enough."