You know the old saying, that no one man is an island. Well that especially applies here. I have to say that when I moved to the PC world from the old TRS-80 CoCo, I felt that I had given up a lot.

I knew practically everything about the CoCo and I knew practically nothing about the PC. All I had to go on was my programming experience in general. So I would like to make a few acknowledgments here and recommend some other sources for your programming journeys.

Many thanks too...

First off I'd like to give thanks to my local community college when back in 1993 I was first exposed to PC's prior to getting mine own in 1994. I learned everything I could on the machine and used the programming language QBasic which was widely available on campus.

Thanks to Microsoft for keeping the BASIC language true to it's origins and adding some nice features in QBasic. I found that since MS wrote both the BASIC interpreter for CoCo and QBasic, learning QBasic was easy (I already knew about half the language!). Also the bundled games (Gorrillas and Nibbles) really helped in learning to exploit the new features in QBasic.

Thanks to the authors Greg Perry and Tom Swan who wrote the books ' Moving from QBasic to C' and ' Type and Learn C' respectively. Those books were a big help in learning the C language, which was very foreign to me at the time. Also thanks to my C instructor James Parrish at DCC, his class help clarify many of the nuances of C that I was still unsure about. Kudos to you all...

Thanks should also go to the authors Andre LaMothe and Dave Roberts who wrote the books ' Teach yourself Game Programming in 21 Days' and ' PC Game Programming Explorer' respectively. I had not the time to even begin to try to figure out how the graphics system in the PC worked. I remembered learning everything myself about the graphics system in the CoCo and it took a loooong time even when I was in high school and had all the free time in the world to learn it inside and out. Andre really opened my eyes to the ridiculously simple VGA memory map of Mode 13h and Dave gave a real good explanation on Mode X and the Mouse and Keyboard interface. Andre also did an overall excellent job at illustrating the Keyboard and sound card interface as well.

And lastly, I want to thank everyone who has contributed code to me or to the Internet news groups that I frequent. You may find a posting or two from me under my alias 'Inspector Gadget.' (Go Gadget go!!!)

Oh and let me not forget to thank Geocities for providing space for this web site to flourish. Click on their hyperlink below to get your own page here free of charge.

Recommended reading

All the books I have mentioned above are highly recommended reading material for those of you who are really into programming. In addition I listed some other material that I thought was worth checking out. They are as follows:

• Your software's user's manual
  You laugh but there really is a lot of good information in them books. You won't beleive the many times I find a question posted on the news groups about a programming problem that they could have easily figured out for themselves had they have taken the time to just read the manual.

• Teach yourself Assembler by Mark Goodwin
  Although I don't do a lot of assembly, I think a basic understanding of it should be learned by all you would be programmer's who plan to write some serious software. Many times assembly comes in very handy for writing functions that one could not otherwise write in their chosen high level language. It has a great Assembler language reference and some samples to help put it all together. (Now if I could only find an Assembler to assemble the source code with.)

Getting Started | Assumed Knowledge | References | Acknowledgements

Programming related links | Most recent updates | About me