Yesterday, while looking for other things in my partent’s place, I found a book I had not seen for a very long time: “Basic para niños” (Basic for children) written in Spanish by Sofía Watt and Miguel Mangada. I was 8 when I got it as the text book for an optional complementary course at primary school, two hours per week, where I was the only one under 12. I was too small and did not manage to learn more than the simple concepts at that time, but it was a lot of fun.
More than two decades have gone away, I have not programmed in Basic for a long time now, but when I saw it again, I realized that probably that small and simple book had quite a lot of influence in what I decided to do during the last decade… study computer science at the university, try to be part of the free software moviment, do my Ph.D. in software engineering, create Igalia with a group of colleagues from UDC… and it will probably have in what it is still to come 🙂
This was also my first programming book 🙂
I do remember the cover being different in my edition, though. The character was more like an R2D2-style robot. I wonder why they changed it (not a lawsuit from George Lucas, I hope 🙂 ). Or am I hallucinating? I had that book sometime in 1984, I think.