[Vextasy]

It’s a really nicely written manual, clearly targeted at the novice.

Appendix B (Limitations on BASIC) gives a rule-of-thumb for the maximum length of a program as "in general about 2 feet".

It was evidently possible to create a complex program in 2 feet as they make the suggestion (on page 46) that a GOTO or IF might jump to a REM statement.

However, some unusual advice is given on page 4 which might have caused confusion: Because “line numbers also serve to specify the order in which the statements are performed by the computer … you could type your program in any order”.

[varjag]

The advice is not unusual if you consider fullscreen editors were not a thing yet. One entered the program line by line in the editor prompt.

[Vextasy]

Yes, you could be right there. Perhaps that was why.

I do remember being grateful (in later versions of BASIC) for the RENUMBER command, which does not appear in this early version, but which allowed you to create space between lines to insert new ones.

The other reason that it might have seemed pertinent to the writer was that CARDBASIC (page 50), in which each line of program appears on a card, also requires you to place a line number on a card, and so the order of cards in the deck would not have been important.

[fuzzfactor]

It's a short document but basically all you need to go forward doing worthwhile programming from there.

And come back to as a reference to help you get the most out of the language within the limitations of that particular version.

There should be lots more pieces of hardware which are ready-to-program with at least a BASIC as minimal as this today, with concise documentation intended as a full reference first, with programming tips and examples along the way.