Item — HN Reader

Exactly!

I had a 1991-issued book called “Professor Fortran's Encyclopaedia“ in my childhood. It introduced me to computers, modems, viruses and even several BASIC commands in the form of a comic book with funny characters:

http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Энциклопедия_профессора_Фортран...

I did not learn programming from it (it contained no actual code other than a “hello world”), but it fired up my imagination and introduced me to computery things. I didn't get to have an actual computer until five years later, but when I finally got it, I got into programming immediately.

This kind of books is extremely underrepresented and I believe very valuable.

3 comments

For me personally it was a book about William Pasteur and his development of the rabies vaccine. That book lit a fire in my mind for molecular biology (though that was not a well known "thing" at the time). To this day I can vividly recall the pictures of the "invisible army" marching through a sick kid's blood vessels. They were drawn as soldiers with bayonets and they stabbed the amorphous black blobby germs. A few years ago I located the book on Amazon. Interesting to see I'm not the only one whose career was influenced by this book: http://amzn.com/0916392066

Awesome reading your post! My dad bought this book at a Goodwill when I was a kid, and I still remember how some of my friends thought the title was cheesy (you know, at that age when we're already trying to be adults and macho), yet my dad explained to me how it was actually very important, and how great and important Pasteur and the great lineage of scientists were. Awesome.

Thanks for introducing me to профессор фортран! I'd never heard of him before. Looks fantastic.

I agree - the Usborne computer books made a huge impression on me as a youngster. I'm all for Hello Ruby.

Thanks so much for the link! The whole day I was trying to remember this book because it was also this exact book that helped me get interested in computing!

No problem!

Here are the scans:

http://trinixy.ru/9306-jenciklopedija_professora_fortrana_25...