A World Tour of True BASIC: for Windows Programming (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781539313373)

John R. Arscott, a retired Chemical Engineer and father of five children, lives in the heart of rural England. A prolific inventor and innovator, the author is also an artist and a Fellow of the Institution of Analysts and Programmers. He acquired his initial skills in computer programming in 1962 on a Ferranti Mercury computer with barely 16K memory, while working for Imperial Chemical Industries. He has maintained and improved his skills since that time, and has a wide range of commercial programs to his credit, including the latest True BASIC editor. In his spare time he has written and published many novels. In his own words, "As an artist I paint what I see, and in my books I paint in words what I see in my mind." During his career he has traveled to most countries in the world, and this is reflected in the scope and subject matter of his writing. His novels cover a wide range of genres, from thrillers, to period romance and science fiction, and he admits that background research often takes much longer than writing the novel itself. In most of his novels he takes a simple moral issue to extreme limits and provokes his characters, and the reader, into confronting the issue in unconventional ways. He admits that writing textbooks about computer programming is a far more exacting and painful departure from writing novels. However, he feels justified in writing this book in order to pass on some of his experience, so that the novices of today don't make the same mistakes that he made many times yesterday.