{"id":17974,"date":"2025-10-18T12:37:20","date_gmt":"2025-10-18T16:37:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/?p=17974"},"modified":"2025-10-18T12:37:20","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T16:37:20","slug":"tom-pittmans-a-short-course-in-programming-for-the-rca-1802","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/18\/tom-pittmans-a-short-course-in-programming-for-the-rca-1802\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Pittman&#8217;s \u201cA Short Course in Programming\u201d for the RCA 1802"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Tom&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ittybittycomputers.com\/IttyBitty\/ShortCor.htm\">A Short Course In Programming<\/a> (1980) is a good introduction for new 1802 programmers. Print copies are rare, so someone on the <em>cosmacelf<\/em> group asked if it <a href=\"https:\/\/groups.io\/g\/cosmacelf\/topic\/115104361#msg49369\">existed as a printable PDF<\/a>. Well, when you put it like that \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/scruss.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/TomPittman-A_Short_Course_in_Programming.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tom Pittman &#8211; A Short Course in Programming<\/a> (97 pages, PDF, US Letter paper)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/scruss.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/TomPittman-A_Short_Course_in_Programming.epub\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Tom Pittman &#8211; A Short Course in Programming<\/a> (EPUB, <a href=\"https:\/\/scruss.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/TomPittman-A_Short_Course_in_Programming-epub.zip\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">zipped<\/a>)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>conversion shell script, for those who like to tinker and\/or want to use a sensible page size: <a href=\"https:\/\/scruss.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/short_course-sh.zip\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">short_course.sh<\/a> (zipped). It uses <a href=\"https:\/\/curl.se\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">curl<\/a> to download the web pages and Calibre&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/manual.calibre-ebook.com\/generated\/en\/ebook-convert.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ebook-convert<\/a> to do the HTML \u2192 PDF (and e-book) magic.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>The linked PDF is quite similar to what you&#8217;d get if you went to Tom&#8217;s page and selected <em>File<\/em> \u2192 <em>Print\u2026<\/em> in your browser, except:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>the cover image is a <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/ELF_II\">Netronics ELF II<\/a>, from <a href=\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=15795865\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Wikimedia Commons<\/a> \u2014 with the appropriate attribution inserted into the document, as required by the image licence;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>a known typo is corrected: references to <em>$2E80<\/em> are changed to <em>$2E82<\/em>;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>the document links to Tom&#8217;s site.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p>All of this is done automatically, so if any of the source URLs change, the script will break.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tom&#8217;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 \u2026 The linked PDF is quite similar to what you&#8217;d get if you went to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Tom Pittman's \u201cA Short Course in Programming\u201d for the RCA 1802 as PDF and EPUB\n\n#RetroComputing #CDP1802 #Cosmac #RCA #1802","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[3352,3353,3351,3348,2164,3354,3349,3355,765,3347,3350,2556],"class_list":["post-17974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers-suck","tag-3352","tag-cdp1802","tag-cosmac","tag-elf","tag-epub","tag-hexadecimal","tag-machine_code","tag-netronics","tag-pdf","tag-programming","tag-rca","tag-retrocomputing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQNZZ-4FU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17974"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17976,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17974\/revisions\/17976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}