Hi,
Glad you’re enjoying your new BBC and kit that goes with. Two and a half years ago I started to learn to code in Basic from scratch and have been moving on to assembly of late. I have attached images of the books that I found really helpful, I’ve listed them below in the order that I went through them as there’s kind of a natural progression.
Once I’d worked through the BASIC books I then got hold of the Beebug magazines and started working through games that I liked the look of. I found those by Jonathan Temple and Matt Eastmond great fun to learn from. I started with a shooter, then a maze type game and then moved on to a couple of Jonathan Temple’s platform games “Ebony Castle” and “Tombs of Tutenkhamen”. I also found “Bouncer” an Arkanoid type game good fun to learn from and also Cubert but they were from personal preference. In between learning what these games did and how I wrote my own code to test my understanding of concepts from the games.
Beebug Magazines to Download:
http://8bs.com/beebugmags.htm
Beebug Games to checkout via BBCMICRO.CO.UK before you get stuck in:
https://bbcmicro.co.uk/index.php?rt_R=& ... bug&sort=b
Books I read and found helpful in the order I used them:
1. BBC MIcro User Guide / this is used a LOT and is always open!
2. BBC Basic - R.B.Coates / Basic stuff but a good one to get going from nothing along with the User Guide
3. The BBC Micro Book - Jim McGregor and Alan Watt / More advanced Basic, sound and graphics I found a good next step
4. BBC Micro Gamesmaster - Kay Ewbank and Mike James / This got me used to putting things on screen and moving it around plus more.
5. Structured Programming - Roy Atherton / I think this has helped me write tidy programmes that have good structure to them (well not bad!)
6. Creative Graphics -John Cownie / Lots of knowledge on graphics etc
7. BBC Micro an Expert Guide - Mike James / Lots of information at an understandable level for me when I was new about how the machine works.
Then on the assembler which is still very much work in progress for me:
1. Assembly Programming Made Easy - Ian Murray / A clear and understandable intro into assembly
2. Assembly Language Programming for the BBC 2nd Ed - Ian Birnbaum / A good grounding to build knowledge of how you do many of the things you can do in Basic in Assembler and more.
3. Creative Assembler - Jonathan Griffiths / Assembly games and getting started down this path.
4. Advance User Guide / for reference
My goal has been to work through this lot and especially the Beebug Magazine games and then start to learn how to convert some of the ones I like to assembly. I’m still a very big work in progress but it’s great fun. I’m also experimenting in a similar way on my A3010 as well with BASIC and C.
I hope this helps a little.
Cheers
Rob
