@epidiah i love the programming books from the home 8-bit era because they were largely about learning how to solve a problem on your own… not which $100 software package to use or how to set yourself up for a career in programming the end of the world, but like ‘here are a bunch of basic routines for doing x and y, slap ‘em all together and you can balance your checkbook’
they really treated the computer as a malleable box of nothing, waiting for you to find their purpose.