That was the easy part, coming up with algorithms, data structures (what is that?), and the actual hardware and OS mappings, was already beyond that book.
Until I got hold of Input magazines collection, I was pretty much stuck with my Timex 2068 manual, and its set of demos.
It is like learning a foreign language from a dictionary without anything else, until someone else shows the structure of the sentences.
So true. My first parser was for a little text adventure I wrote. I didn't know parsing was a thing people might write about, so I just muddled through some text manipulation in Atari BASIC it until it worked. Even sorting was something you just had to figure out - I managed to come up with bubble sort on my own, presumably like many others did in those days, unaware that sorting was well-trodden territory.
Until I got hold of Input magazines collection, I was pretty much stuck with my Timex 2068 manual, and its set of demos.
It is like learning a foreign language from a dictionary without anything else, until someone else shows the structure of the sentences.