The advice to solder is based on the idea that breadboards (the plastic things with hundreds of square holes) can sometimes not connect properly or can introduce noise and signal problems.
For basic and not so basic circuits, breadboarding is fine and the speed that you pull everything out and put it together again more than makes up for the few breadboard based problems you might have.
Speed of play is important. Soldering onto PCB's or vero will slow you right down and make it less fun.
Once you get to fast switching signals (external crystals and microcontrollers) you'll want to steer away from breadboards but they'll serve you well at first.
In the early to mid 80's I had a a Commodore VIC 20 then a C64. I would have loved a Spectrum and a BBC too.
I wrote and released a couple of games which earnt rather more pocket money then my teenage mates were working for. I then went on to do a CS degree, caught the Unix bug and have done some form of consultancy ever since.
Now the point of the "long in the tooth" second article reflects changes in hardware people learn on.
On the 8 bit micros there were no protected memory systems - even the video ram was just a part of the normal memory. Writing values all over the video ram was a great and simple way of visualising data.
In real time too - remember those program loaders that had flashing horizontal bars whizzing all over the screen? That was an increment on the background colour register for each block of data loaded from the tape.
When working on a longish routine you could increment the border colour at the start and decrement it at the end and see - visually and instantly - how long your routine took. About half a vertical inch on a display updating at 50Hz - that's quick enough because there's 3 more inches before the scanning beam comes back round to the top of the display.
You could do this in BASIC, but once you see the lack of speed you'd grab an assembler. These weren't free by the way - the cartridge for the VIC20 cost about GBP35 at the time - 6 weeks pocket money.
Moving onto Unix systems and you get the ideas of protected memory and decoupling your programming libraries. Great concepts for what they're needed for, but you get further and further away from the hardware and that has an effect on the kind of software you think about writing.
From what I understand of the console hardware now it's a bit more like the "whole machine to yourself" 8 bit micro's of the 80's. But then the development tools cost 6 months mortgage instead of 6 months pocket money.
Shame the console vendors have their hardware lock in practices and the idea of modding circuit boards is increasingly legally sidelined.
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Soldering can wait, for a while at least.
The advice to solder is based on the idea that breadboards (the plastic things with hundreds of square holes) can sometimes not connect properly or can introduce noise and signal problems.
For basic and not so basic circuits, breadboarding is fine and the speed that you pull everything out and put it together again more than makes up for the few breadboard based problems you might have.
Speed of play is important. Soldering onto PCB's or vero will slow you right down and make it less fun.
Once you get to fast switching signals (external crystals and microcontrollers) you'll want to steer away from breadboards but they'll serve you well at first.
Components are like basic lego blocks, kits are like modern lego that you just assemble into someone else's design.
You'll learn best when you wonder "what if..."
Try it out on a breadboard, blow up some caps or burn your fingers - ah! that's what current flow is!
Please blog your progress, and leave it a while before getting into microcontrollers.
In the early to mid 80's I had a a Commodore VIC 20 then a C64. I would have loved a Spectrum and a BBC too.
I wrote and released a couple of games which earnt rather more pocket money then my teenage mates were working for. I then went on to do a CS degree, caught the Unix bug and have done some form of consultancy ever since.
Now the point of the "long in the tooth" second article reflects changes in hardware people learn on.
On the 8 bit micros there were no protected memory systems - even the video ram was just a part of the normal memory. Writing values all over the video ram was a great and simple way of visualising data.
In real time too - remember those program loaders that had flashing horizontal bars whizzing all over the screen? That was an increment on the background colour register for each block of data loaded from the tape.
When working on a longish routine you could increment the border colour at the start and decrement it at the end and see - visually and instantly - how long your routine took. About half a vertical inch on a display updating at 50Hz - that's quick enough because there's 3 more inches before the scanning beam comes back round to the top of the display.
You could do this in BASIC, but once you see the lack of speed you'd grab an assembler. These weren't free by the way - the cartridge for the VIC20 cost about GBP35 at the time - 6 weeks pocket money.
Moving onto Unix systems and you get the ideas of protected memory and decoupling your programming libraries. Great concepts for what they're needed for, but you get further and further away from the hardware and that has an effect on the kind of software you think about writing.
From what I understand of the console hardware now it's a bit more like the "whole machine to yourself" 8 bit micro's of the 80's. But then the development tools cost 6 months mortgage instead of 6 months pocket money.
Shame the console vendors have their hardware lock in practices and the idea of modding circuit boards is increasingly legally sidelined.
What if the advertising made the game free, not just lowered the cost?