The Century Computer Programming Course

Name: The Century Computer Programming Course review
Item: The Century Computer Programming Course
Rating: 6
Author: The Speccy

Reviewed 23 August 2026

Sinclair BASIC ZX81 ZX Spectrum Programming guide

Publisher: Century Publishing, 1983 · Author: Peter Morse, Ian Adamson, Ben Anrep & Brian Hancock

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Cover of The Century Computer Programming Course, showing the title over a photo of a ZX Spectrum keyboard — The Century Computer Programming Course (Century Publishing, 1983).

The Century Computer Programming Course — full title The Complete Guide to Programming in Sinclair BASIC Using the ZX81 and Spectrum Microcomputers — is a book that was clearly aimed above the usual pocket-money price point of Spectrum literature. It shipped as a hardback (ISBN 0-7126-0072-8, with a paperback edition at 0-7126-0073-6) for £9.95 in 1983, when the Spectrum itself could be had new for not much more than three times that. That's a serious ask for a programming manual, and it tells you something about who Century Publishing thought was buying it: not a kid with a Christmas-present Spectrum, but a household that already owned a ZX81 and had just added, or was about to add, a Spectrum alongside it.

That dual focus is the book's defining feature. Rather than picking one machine and teaching Sinclair BASIC through it, it covers the ZX81 and the Spectrum together — a genuinely useful angle for 1983, when plenty of families had upgraded rather than replaced, and the differences between the two dialects of Sinclair BASIC (the ZX81's integer-only arithmetic and single-line command entry versus the Spectrum's floating point, colour, and sound) were exactly the kind of thing that could trip up someone moving from one machine to the other.

Trying one of the listings: Splat

A course book like this lives or dies by whether the listings actually work when you type them in, so it's worth showing one running rather than just describing the theory chapters. Buried among the exercises is a short reflex game: catch a falling ball with a bat you steer along the bottom of the screen using the 5 and 8 keys, twelve balls per go. The program's own REM header calls it "BUG", but the message it actually prints on a miss is SPLAT — the book never explains the mismatch, and the listing itself is the only surviving record of what it was meant to be called.

Scanned BASIC listing for the Splat game from The Century Computer Programming Course, lines 5 to 220, with bracketed editorial notes in the margin calling out exact spacing such as [2 Spaces,*] and [3 SP,<=>,3 SP] — The listing as printed, margin notes and all. Sinclair BASIC's `PRINT AT` positioning is unforgiving of a miscounted space, so the book spells out exactly how many blanks belong in each string rather than trusting the reader to count them off the page.

Typed in and run, it's a perfectly serviceable five-minute diversion: the bat (<=>) waits at the bottom while a ball (O) fine-tunes its horizontal position mid-fall thanks to a bit of one-line arithmetic at line 90 that only sometimes nudges its column, so no two drops behave quite the same.

Splat running on a ZX Spectrum: a bat drawn as <=> at the bottom of the screen, four O characters marking the fall of a ball, and an asterisk showing the ball's current row — Mid-game — the bat waits under the ball's projected column, or doesn't, depending how good the read on line 90's arithmetic is.

Miss enough of them (or just give up and press 6, the listing's own quit key at line 70) and the score prints, followed by 9 STOP statement, 140:1 at the bottom of the screen. That's not a crash: it's Sinclair BASIC's completely ordinary way of announcing that line 140's STOP command — the listing's actual, intended ending — has been reached. Type-ins of this era routinely ended this way rather than with a tidy menu, which is exactly the kind of unglossed detail that separates an original scan of the exercises from a modern paraphrase of them.

Splat's end-of-game screen: 'You scored 2 out of 12' above the Sinclair BASIC report line '9 STOP statement, 140:1' — Two out of twelve, and BASIC's report line confirming the program ended exactly where the listing says it should — line 140, statement 1.

Verdict

It was reviewed contemporaneously in both Sinclair User (July 1983) and Your Spectrum (January 1984), which at least confirms it registered as a real contender in a crowded field of Spectrum programming books rather than sinking without trace. Whether the hardback price bought genuinely better material than the cheaper paperback guides on the same shelf is the harder question — but the premise, a single course spanning both Sinclair machines rather than starting from scratch on each, was a solid one for the audience it was clearly built for.

Score breakdown

Content ███████░░░ 7/10 — A genuinely useful dual-machine angle for 1983 households
Value █████░░░░░ 5/10 — £9.95 hardback, well above the usual price of Spectrum programming guides
Overall ██████░░░░ 6/10

Play & download

The Century Computer Programming Course at Spectrum Computing — bibliographic entry and cover scan.
Read the full text — scanned and OCR'd at the Internet Archive.

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