Very Basic BASIC

Very Basic BASIC: The First 15 Hours on Your Commodore 64 is a beginner's BASIC course by Derek Ellershaw and Peter Schofield, published in 1984 by Century Publishing Co. Ltd, London, with Melbourne House (Publishers) Ltd of Tring, Hertfordshire. ISBN 0 7126 0412 X. The printed book has 119 numbered pages followed by an index. The scan comes from the retro-commodore.eu archive and has an OCR text layer.

The back cover describes it as a guide for a new Commodore 64 owner's first few weeks of programming, with every example program presented as a quiz, game or self-questionnaire.

Contents

Contents, from the book's contents pages

Chapter	Title	Page
Section 1: Pre-programming		1
1	Introduction	3
2	Keyboard basics	7
3	How to correct mistakes	15
4	The REM command	21
5	Uses of the PRINT command	23
6	How to use END	31
Section 2: Basic programming techniques		35
7	How to use INPUT	37
8	Numbers and your computer (arithmetic, numeric variables, FOR...NEXT, RND and INT)	45
9	Strings and things!	63
10	Looping and branching (GOTO, IF...THEN)	71
11	Screen clearing	77
12	Subroutines (GOSUB)	81
13	Summary	85
Section 3: Useful aids		87
14	Using the printer	89
15	Using the tape recorder	91
Section 4: More about programming		93
16	Conditional statements (IF, AND, OR)	95
17	How to handle data (READ and DATA)	103
18	How to adapt programs	111

The OCR text layer misreads several chapter numbers on the contents pages: chapter 2 comes out as "S", chapter 5 as "8", and chapters 12 and 15 as "18". The printed chapters run in order from 1 to 18.

The book covers BASIC programming only; it has nothing on the hardware of the Commodore 64.

Related pages

• Commodore 64
• Category:Commodore Books

Download: MelbourneHouse_Very_Basic_BASIC.pdf (13 MB)