Need Rec: Book to teach about computers and BASIC at an eight year old level

[Tapley, Mark]

On May 27, 2016, at 2:37 PM, Jay West <jwest at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> Drlegendre wrote...
> -----
> And BASIC is great, but as soon as the kid grasps the concepts, move him to Perl or Python ASAP. 
> -----
> 
> I suggest instead... 
> "BASIC is great, but as soon as the kid grasps the concepts, move him to assembly language ASAP."
> 
> *grin*
> I'm only 10% kidding lol

Ew - apologies, been top-posting all day to my other email correspondents, please stand on your head while you read my last post ;-).

Jay has a great point. With PC-XT class hardware, he will want to do things faster. If some of your tasks for him are suitable for short assebly language programs, and he can make them happen 100 times faster than in BASIC, that might grab his attention. 

Of course, rather than expose him to 8088 assembler, I’d recommend you run right out and grab a used TRS-80 Color Computer - cheap, and 6809 assembly is very very nice - no segment registers.

The downside of *that* is that if he ever decides to use the “Sign Extend” instruction, you’ll have to have a talk with him about the birds, the bees, and where little subroutines come from :-).
										- Mark