[noufalibrahim]

I haven't read there but there were a series of "Monster" books which taught various topics (also, IIRC by Usborne). I had the ones on simple home chemistry and a photocopy of the one on BASIC programming. The latter was exceptionally informative for a child. Some things stand out.

1. You had to type the code in to get it working. There would inevitably be errors which I had to debug and fix that taught me that skill.

2. I had GW-BASIC on DOS while the book used another dialect and it had some "porting guides" in the appendix. I sort of learnt some lower level details from porting the programs to work on my computer.

I also feel that they had a friendly but "gloves off" approach to teaching. They treated their (child) audience as smart, intelligent, small adults rather than kids who needed to be entertained to learn anything and achieved something which, I feel, is missing in many modern books.