[Scuds]

My local library(US) had a few of these and I'd copied some BASIC programs them onto my Apple //c and didn't know why they didn't work all the time, specifically $CHR or anything involving peek and poke.

8 year old me knew there was something different about the comic art alongside the text, yet I couldn't explain what. Turns out - British!

The machine code books would have been useful at that time, but again, I'm 8 playing with a hand-me-down Apple with no other help. I don't know what I don't know and I have no mentorship and no internet or bbs access to download new stuff.

Kids today have access to all the video tutorials they could ever want.

e: God DAMN line numbers suck. And double god damn do line editors (think ed as opposed to vim) with no proper backspace.

[alisonatwork]

I had the same problem - our family had an Amstrad CPC! It was rare to find books that had listings that worked in their entirety, but if you had a source of native listings (e.g. in the CPC case from magazine Amstrad Action) then it was possible to port some of the programs.

I was also too young in those days to be able to understand how to port PEEK, POKE and so forth, but I do credit trying to get stuff working (often in futility) toward my future interest in becoming a professional computer programmer. (Of course I'm not writing games like I imagined.) The experience of trying to parse mystery code is surprisingly similar to frustrations with finding libraries that almost but not quite solve your problem, or web layouts that look okay in most browsers until you encounter a weird screen size, and so on. I wonder if this background is what led me to being the kind of developer who greatly prefers maintenance, troubleshooting and bug fixing to new feature development.