The material for this book first appeared in the magazine Personal Computer World, as a series of articles which ran from September 1979 to June 1980. It was designed to appeal to a new (in 1979) sort of reader the microcomputer enthusiast, both amateur and professional about whom two assumptions were made. The first was that the reader was someone who had already learned to program (probably in BASIC) and who wanted to create programs in as systematic and proficient a fashion as possible. The second was that the reader would not be adverse to an occasional glimpse of how the underlying machine played its part in executing these programs. As a result of these, no attempt was made to teach the "problem-solving" aspects of programming (although the Top-Down philosophy for program design formed a key feature) and no apology was made for the repeated references to the way in which a Pascal compiler "viewed" some particular code fragment. In preparing this material for publication as a single volume, there has been little deviation from this policy. Nevertheless, it should be remarked that the first five chapters contain all the material one would need to cover in an initial course in programming (up to the level of most BASIC's) while the second half of the book tackles some of the more sophisticated techniques available to the Pascal programmer.
