For those of you who grew up in the 1980s, you  might remember the series of titles published by Usborne Books about what would be considered quite esoteric subjects today, from how to program in BASIC on your favourite home computer, to writing adventure games, and even how to write Z80 and 6502 assembler (and yes, I had a copy of the last two books!)

As various parts of the computer press have stated this week, Usborne have made PDFs available of these books for free download, which you can find here.  There is also a blog posting on how the books came about here.  (Even now, I’m still amazed they even published the book on assembler programming back then!)

Perhaps one day I should port the adventure game that’s described in “Write your own Adventure Programs for your Microcomputer” to something like Inform…