Book Review - How to write an Apple program - Vol.1

It's book review time again and I wanted to talk about one of the BASIC programming books I recently finished reading.  The book is called “How to write an apple program” by Ed Faulk. This is an old school programming book, which gives more theory than examples.  This is the type of book you read when you want to learn the formal structure of how to write a basic program.  It does a lot of explaining through text and uses lots of verbiage to gets its point across.  Some newer programmers are not going to like the slow, methodical pace of this book because it takes it's time in presenting the subject matter and gives you an in-depth approach to each topic, yet lacks extensive code examples.

The book contains 13 chapters and you literally don't program a single piece of code till the middle of the 5th chapter!  That is how deep the text is in this book. 

The topics covered in the book are as follows:

            Ideas - Idea categories
            Where to get ideas
            Combining ideas
            Planning the Program
            Program Function
            Program Overview
            Designing the Program
            Flowcharts
            Pseudo-code
            Coding the Program
            Modular Coding Techniques
            Structured Approaches
            Testing/Debugging
            Approaches to testing
            Fixing Bugs the easy way
            The end of the journey
            Readable documentation
            Eqilogue

The book's pages are not numbered like a normal book, they are sectioned out like a manual with 1-1 and 2-3 as examples.

I do have to say, I did like reading this book only because it was like reading a story, you feel as if you are part of a programming adventure and the book is taking you on that adventure.  It can get a little frustrating to have such small amounts of programming code to work with but the theory is excellent.  Also, the chapters on Flowcharting are really good because they explain the true process of how a program should function and flow.  You get a better understanding of what you are trying to do when you create a working flowchart.  This too is old school programming at its best.

The function of this book is to get you to understand the program writing process and what is needed to create a working program straight off the bat.  When you learn to first plan out your steps and then design your flowchart, followed with a structured program code base, you know your program is going to work the first time!

The code examples given are not exceptionally hard to understand and they are fun to test.  The book also has a lot of illustrations but they too are of an older style and tend to give it that corny 60's feel. 

At the end of the book there is a Checkbook program written in modular form and structured form!

As I said before, there are not a lot of examples and you will be reading each chapter as opposed to writing programs and testing them.

This book is not for everyone and if you have any knowledge with basic programming I would stay clear of this book.  This book is for the true beginner and programmers who want to enjoy a readable book with more theory and story then code.   You will get a better feel for how to program the correct way and it does do a good job of teaching you all the basic fundamentals of programming an apple computer in basic!

If you find it for less than $10 it's an ok read.

Price  - N/A

Date: 1982

Rating is on a 1 to 10 scale with 10 being the highest.

Depth  - 9
Programming – 3
Sample codes - 2
Quality – 7
Bulk - 7
Information – 8
Humor – 6

Overall rating –6