Starting FORTH
by Leo Brodie, Inc Staff Forth · first published 1981
84% recommend16% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Gentle, playful introduction to Forth, with comics and a fuller treatment than a light primer. Teaches factoring and stack thinking, and shows how a Forth is built. Suits beginners; Thinking Forth is the follow-up.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Starting Forth by Leo Brodie is a classic book. Forth is a very elegant language. I came across a javascript implementation of it recently, which you can look up yourself :)
on “How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language” ↗Forth is not just another language for the sake of it. I am currently learning Forth from Leo Brodie's excellent books "Starting Forth" and "Thinking Forth". It actually changes the way you think. Just as Lisp does - almost a feeling of "a new planet swims into his ken". The main feature of the Forth style is to write lots of 1 to 2…
on “zForth – Tiny, embeddable, flexible, compact Forth for embedded systems” ↗Leo Brodie's 'Starting Forth'. Just a great book on how to think about factoring a program.
on “Which is your favorite 70-80s computer book?” ↗…career, you should learn an ALGOL-descendant (C, C++, C#, Java, etc), a Lisp-descendant (CL, Scheme, etc), A Prolog-descendant (Prolog itself, maybe SQL as a programming language), A Forth (better yet, read Starting Forth by Leo Brodie and write your own), an ML-descendant (like Haskell) and an APL-descendant like J. Nearly every language leans heavily upon one of these foundations.
on “Goal for 2011: Do not learn another programming language” ↗Take the book as a specification, then make your own Forth implementation. Edit: Starting Forth also by Brodie would probably be a better “spec” for implementing a Forth.
on “Alan Kay's answer to ‘what are some forgotten books programmers should read?’” ↗In addition to arduino-forth.com, definitely check out Starting Forth by Leo Brodie. It's a great book. Probably one of the best technical books out there. You can read it for free online. Sadly, it is out of print. You can find used copies though.
on “Lisp in Forth” ↗I love introductory textbooks. Some of my favorites: "Starting Forth" - Leo Brodie "Computer Science, Logo-Style" series - Brian Harvey "Algebra", "Functions and Graphs", "Methods of Coordinates", "Trigonometry" - I.M. Gelfand (does anyone know if he completed his Geometry…
on “Ask HN: What is your favorite introductory-level textbook?” ↗This is the first chapter of Starting FORTH, which is my favorite technical book. The author of this classic, Leo Brodie, recently joined a recorded zoom session with some FORTHers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--IJEl6HV2k
on “Fundamental Forth (2016)” ↗Starting FORTH by Leo Brodie - Written in a casual, funny, beginner friendly way, and even though I'm not a beginner I still enjoyed it immensely. Now if only Forth were more popular! Edit: realised OP said `thing'…
on “Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?” ↗Leo Brodie's book Starting Forth's good tutorial
on “PostScript Language Reference (1999) [pdf]” ↗Starting Forth by Leo Brodie
on “Ask HN: What are some of the best well-written books on computer science?” ↗This was one of the first programming books I read as a kid, after Brodie's "Starting Forth" and a bunch of not very memorable books about BASIC. It remains the standard to which I hold all programming books I read. The author's enthusiasm and patient but never patronizing style drew me in,…
on “Thinking Forth (1984)” ↗No I'm thinking of LoL, but I meant the irreverence and comical simplicity like Leo Brodie's Starting Forth, but also focusing on how to write one from scratch (you are correct LoL doesn't do this).
on “Forth: The Hacker’s Language” ↗'A Fortran Coloring Book', Kaufmann (MIT Press) 'Starting Forth', and 'Thinking Forth' by Leo Brodie. I'd say the 'Head First' books are modern equivalents with a similar spirit.
on “Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?” ↗Starting Forth / Thinking Forth from Brodie are great too They are now freely downloadable: http://www.exemark.com/FORTH/StartingFORTHfromForthWebsitev9... http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/
on “Land of Lisp (2010)” ↗