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

drlegendre . drlegendre at gmail.com
Fri May 27 13:36:48 CDT 2016


I can suggest "Instant BASIC: Freeze-dried Computer Programming: Jerald R.
Brown" as a good kids entry-level text. Like numerous other 1980s era DIY
computer books, it's probably available for free download from archive.org.
I also have a spare copy.

And BASIC is great, but as soon as the kid grasps the concepts, move him to
Perl or Python ASAP. Basic -> Perl is very easy, heck you can even use line
numbers if you want.. and it's a far more useful language in the modern
environment.

On Fri, May 27, 2016 at 12:49 PM, william degnan <billdegnan at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Trombetta wrote a book
> "BASIC for students using the IBM PC"
>
>
> On Fri, May 27, 2016 at 1:29 PM, Ali <cctalk at ibm51xx.net> wrote:
>
> > So somewhat OT - I've setup an 8 year old w/ an IBM PC XT w/ CGA. To say
> he
> > is less than impressed is understating things :). However, I am
> determined
> > that he will learn basic computer terminology, architecture, history
> (i.e.
> > how we got here) and at least get his feet wet with programming by
> learning
> > BASIC this summer.
> >
> > Apparently teaching is not my strong suite - while I can talk about a
> > larger
> > number of the above topics, especially at his level, organizing them in a
> > way to make sense is the problem. I was wondering if anyone could
> recommend
> > a good book that gets the basic stuff out of the way (what is the CPU,
> > memory, storage, etc. what are different the parts called, etc.) and
> maybe
> > another one that teaches an intro to BASIC written for a very young
> reader?
> > It would be nice if the book is in the PD or at least available as a PDF
> > that way he can read it on his Kindle. However, I am not averse to
> buying a
> > physical new (or used book) either.
> >
> > Thanks.
> >
> > -Ali
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> @ BillDeg:
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>


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