Commander X16

Hi folks, just wanted to introduce my book project here. "BASIC Adventures with Professor Moss" is meant to carry on the tradition of 1970s-1980s BASIC programming books, fitting in somewhere between a high-school BASIC textbook and a game-filled type-in manual. The book's target market is middle-school and high-school students interested in programming but not necessarily training for a career as a professional software developer. I believe that the more genius (and/or more ambitious) students are already pretty well-served by the extremely high-quality tutorials and AP courses currently available.

The CX16 is an excellent target for retro-styled games and education software and I believe that BASIC is an excellent first language for average students. BASIC doesn't trip students up with complex syntax, but it's still a thin layer over the hardware that doesn't obfuscate what the computer is actually doing. Students who succeed with BASIC and want to develop professional software are better equipped to understand the more subtle semantics of professional programming languages.

The text and visual content of "BASIC Adventures with Professor Moss" are proprietary, but of course all of the examples are completely free (MIT License). They are, after all, meant to be a starting point for students' work and creative experimentation. They are also deliberately simplified and unoptimized in order to be comprehensible and readable as possible. All examples are WIPs and will be available from this repo: https://github.com/adamrmoss/basic-adventures-moss. Each example is available both as a text .BAS file as well as a tokenized .PRG file.

Many thanks for anyone who bothered to read up on my humble project.

Looks interesting! Good luck!

Any idea when the book itself will be available?

Again, thanks to everyone who has shown some interest! The text will be split into three volumes and they will be available as free PDF. It'll also be available for Kindle, Nook, and Apple eBooks. I'll have a draft of the first volume available to the community sometime on 2024Q1 to solicit feedback and suggestions. It will also help me gauge interest in publishing a proper printed edition.

100% appreciate and excited about the initiative here!

There are a lot of nuances to cover with each of the BASIC keywords. Like the LINPUT# vs INPUT etc, gets a little interesting. Or subtle things like when you PRINT A, where A is an integer, you get an extra space because of the "sign" symbol (implicit + PLUS sign). I wouldn't take for granted that people "know this" because the C64 always did that - there are many at VCF who flat out told us "I've never used a Commodore system" (so saying "you can program it like a Commodore" had no meaning to them).

I'll be curating the upcoming SD content, as far as identifying what is probably good options - others will have the final say on content. We'll see where you're at around mid-November on content - some early system deliveries might be possible, but won't know for sure until about a month from now. Meanwhile, we'll look into if any licensing issues - I don't think any issues, but obviously want to make sure all the parties involved agree on that.


I hope you can fit an appendix or chapter about BASLOAD - understanding BASIC is still essential to using BASLOAD effectively. My rough guideline is once you get past about 100 lines, it's probably time to transition over to BASLOAD.