On 03/29/11 01:06, D Finnigan wrote:
Bill Garber wrote:
Although the "Apple II BASIC Programming Manual" isn't label
as a reference manual, it pretty much is one. 8^)
It has an interesting writing style, that's for sure. :-)
"Unless you type with a hammer."
I love tutorials and textbooks that don't take themselves too seriously,
though it is hard to pull off well.
But isn't this an old American tradition? My father had an textbook, I
believe it was an American textbook, on some fairly obscure area of
bio-chemistry. The time frame was probably the 1970s. IIRC he told me
the book contained numerous jokes like the following: in a list of
needed materials for some experimental setup: "a crate of beer" with a
footnote along the lines of "actually you need only five milliliters,
but having the rest is ideal for drowning your sorrow in case the
experiment, as usual, doesn't work out." (this is from very hazy memory,
not a verbatim quote). At that time, anything like that would've been
absolutely impossible in a university-level German textbook, that's why
he told me about it (approvingly) even when I was a child.