I also still have the books and a CoCo 3. When everyone else I knew either had a c64 or an appleII I was on my own and just had to push through. I started with a CoCo II then UPGRADED to a CoCo III, that's how much I loved that machine. The only other friend I had that was also left out in the cold had an Atari 400. Poor kid asked for an Atari for Christmas thinking he would get a 2600 and instead got that brick ;)
I still have my Color BASIC & Extended Color BASIC books. I have lost all my shit in storage, but I have the CoCo I with the II "upgrade" (16->32k ram, and removing the chiclet keys for the curved ones). We had tons of cassettes and I wanted to donate to archive, but unable to find them now :( I'm worried it's too late with deterioration issues of magnetic media.
I was too young to appreciate what coding was, I could type in programs but had no real understanding of DIM. I thought it was cool that they had a memory map graph in the books to help you program images - you could literally see the array layouts IIRC.
I definitely wouldn't have understood assembly at that age.
Do you mean the Color Computer Archive or the Internet Archive? If it's the former, they might already have much of what were on your missing cassettes.
Not understanding the programs I was typing in from 'The Rainbow' and other sources was quite the source of frustration when I first started out, especially if I typed something wrong or the listing contained an error as I wouldn't understand how to debug it, but over time it eventually taught me a lot about programming.
There's a YouTube channel called 'CocoTown' that's going through creating a Moon Patrol clone in 6809 assembly on the CoCo. I've learned quite a bit from watching those videos.
It would probably work for a Coco3, as the Color BASIC and Extended Color BASIC ROMS didn't change much (there was an additional ROM to support the extra graphics modes).
