Space Attack

Micro Adventure #1

by Eileen Buckholtz, Ruth Glick

Includes a story of a space station under attack and one can use the eight computer programs included to decode the alien messages, break into the enemy's security systen and play the deadly game of laser attack.

Genres: Childrens, Choose Your Own Adventure

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

aka Amanda Lee.

Eileen Garber was born in 1949. She obtained a Master Computer Scientist. During her distinguished career with the Department of Defense (1970-2001), she held a variety of technical leadership and management positions in emerging technology, knowledge management, Internet applications, IT workforce development, project management, policy and planning.

Eileen first fiction book was a collaborative effort with three friends Ruth Glick, Louise Titchener, and Carolyn Males, the result was a romance novel Love is Elected, published in 1982 by Silhouette under the pseudonym Alyssa Howard. She also published two computer books for kids. She wrote over a dozen young adult's books with Ruth Glick, with whom she also wrote romance novels under the pseudonyms: Amanda Lee, Samantha Chase and Rebecca York. But in the late 1990s, she decided to stop writing romance novels and focused in her informatic career.

She is an award-winning web designer since 1994. She serves as President of Technology Concepts, Inc, a web and knowledge management consultant firm for small business and government. Her client list includes bestselling authors such as Nora Roberts, Mary Jo Putney, and Patricia Rice, Bookstores such as Turn the Page Books, and Mystery Loves Company, and other small businesses. She writes a national column on the Internet for Better Health and Living Magazine and is a professor at the University of Phoenix Online and the UOP Maryland campus teaching e-business and web technology courses.

Eileen is married with Howard Buckholtz, and had two sons, Ryan and David. The family lives in Maryland, USA.

Reviews

[J. Boo · Rating 4 out of 5]

You are codenamed Orion, and you are in a book series written in the second person. Even though you are in middle school, you are secretly an agent for ACT - the Adventure Connection Team, which sends you and your teammates on dangerous and exciting missions. Your specialty is computers, and periodically you are prompted by the book to boot up your IBM PC, Commodore 64, or any other 1980s home microcomputer, and type in a program written in BASIC in order to solve a problem, play a minigame, etc. (These programs are detailed in the appendix, which explains how they work, walks you through a troubleshooting process if one of the tasks involved fixing an error, etc.) Alternatively, you can skip the programs entirely and just read about your adventures.

This is a really fun series, and you wish you could find a current equivalent that features Java, bash, Javascript, Python, etc., but you have never yet found one. (If you do find it, you will please mention it in the comments of this review, and receive thanks).

DS#1 (age 6/7) thinks the series is great, despite not having a place to try out the programs. However, you've just now found a website that has the text of many of the books as well as an online window to type in and execute the BASIC programs. This saves you the trouble of figuring out exactly why the C64 emulator you downloaded is giving you a 0xc0000022 error message. (*)

Website is here: http://microadventure.net/

"Space Attack" is also available as a PDF from archive.org : https://archive.org/details/tibook_mi...

(*) You looked into it anyway and found out it was due to weird file permission error. Moving the directory which contained the emulator to the desktop fixed the problem.

[Kat · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another one of my husband's childhood books I stumbled across. I found about 8-10 books of his when he was younger. Reading them when I need a break of the 900+ page book I am currently reading. This one had a storyline but also included a computer program to run on older computers and gaming consoles of the 70s-early 80s. I teased my computer tech husband if he did the program as he read the book when he was a kid and he grinned and said yes. I gave it a 2 star because as an adult and not being into computers I just wasn't too into it. But it gave me a break from the book I'm reading so I'm good.

[Benjamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stumbled onto this series randomly and fortuitously during a stint of learning to code.