Early Learning : Software Development

This book Programming the 6502 by Rodnay Zaks is probably one of the best books on software development I ever had. I bought this around 1980 when I was interested in getting into computer programming using a Commodore PET 8032 8 bit business computer my dad had brought home from his office. He ran VisiCalc on it, one of the very first commercial electronic spreadsheet programs. Well, he didn't run it very much on the system at home because I was coding using this computer a lot of the time and I was a curiosity feature in our house for my older siblings to show their friends this weird younger brother obsessed with a computer (and not with girls..).

I learnt programming in BASIC on the PET, but to create games on this system you really needed to program it in 6502 machine code. The book lists all the 6502 processor instructions and how to use them but also it had some very good sections on structured programming and data structures.

We were in a rural village surrounded by farms, there was no internet then and everything had to be self taught from books like this one or magazine articles - unless you were lucky and your school taught computer science (which was very rare in the late 1970s / early 1980s).

When I went to study Physics at Imperial College in London, I remember one of my first lab sessions which involved using a dedicated HP lab computer to run some numerical processing. We needed to program it in assembler and the processor was the good old familiar 6502. I turned to my lab partner and indicated that we would have this one covered - the book turned out to be a good investment!

Nowadays if you want to learn about software development and practice the craft (or any skill for that matter) there is so much on the internet to help you - blogs, stack-overflow, YouTube videos, open source programs, GitHub, online learning, free IDEs, compilers and tools etc. If you work at a good company or with a great team you can learn from other people or you may have access to online training sites like Lynda.com.

Do not wait for your company to send you on a training course, it may not happen. You need to go out on the Internet, research things and look and learn what you can, try something and maybe fail and try again. Self guided learning can be very satisfying and lead to great rewards!