Tom Pittman’s “A Short Course in Programming” for the RCA 1802

Tom’s A Short Course In Programming (1980) is a good introduction for new 1802 programmers. Print copies are rare, so someone on the cosmacelf group asked if it existed as a printable PDF. Well, when you put it like that …

• Tom Pittman – A Short Course in Programming (97 pages, PDF, US Letter paper)
• Tom Pittman – A Short Course in Programming (EPUB, zipped)
• conversion shell script, for those who like to tinker and/or want to use a sensible page size: short_course.sh (zipped). It uses curl to download the web pages and Calibre’s ebook-convert to do the HTML → PDF (and e-book) magic.

The linked PDF is quite similar to what you’d get if you went to Tom’s page and selected File → Print… in your browser, except:

1. the cover image is a Netronics ELF II, from Wikimedia Commons — with the appropriate attribution inserted into the document, as required by the image licence;
2. a known typo is corrected: references to $2E80 are changed to $2E82;
3. the document links to Tom’s site.

All of this is done automatically, so if any of the source URLs change, the script will break.