It's not going to teach you real world coding, but if you can solve these puzzles, then rest assured that you possess the cognitive ability to become a decent real world software engineer. And along the way, if you're new to programming, then yes, you will learn a couple of things.

For an experienced software engineer though, this is a bit of an exercise in masochism. These microcontrollers are horribly constrained. You have little to work with, so you have to work around all these limitations. That's what puzzles are all about, and that's what I like: making things work with the tools that you've got. A couple of hours into the game, I am impressed. You get the incredible satisfaction of building and debugging a solution that finally works, but without other unpleasant problems that you would have to deal with in the real world :D

Grahically, it is a very smooth and finished product. Very clean and simple, yet detailed in it's visual design.

You can't really be disappointed when you buy this. If it turns out the puzzles are too hard, the builtin solitaire is really slick and novel. (Is that what a chinese card pack looks like? I should do some research.)

On a side note, I love the read/write blocking on the xbus ports. This introduces concurrency complexities that are totally real world (something that few real world programmers ever get a grip on)

I actually want to print the manual. I don't really need to. But I want to. Just as a gimmick. For old times' sake.

It's not going to teach you real world coding, but if you can solve these puzzles, then rest assured that you possess the cognitive ability to become a decent real world software engineer. And along the way, if you're new to programming, then yes, you will learn a couple of things. For an experienced software engineer though, this is a bit of an exercise in masochism. These microcontrollers are horribly constrained. You have little to work with, so you have to work around all these limitations. That's what puzzles are all about, and that's what I like: making things work with the tools that you've got. A couple of hours into the game, I am impressed. You get the incredible satisfaction of building and debugging a solution that finally works, but without other unpleasant problems that you would have to deal with in the real world :D Grahically, it is a very smooth and finished product. Very clean and simple, yet detailed in it's visual design. You can't really be disappointed when you buy this. If it turns out the puzzles are too hard, the builtin solitaire is really slick and novel. (Is that what a chinese card pack looks like? I should do some research.) On a side note, I love the read/write blocking on the xbus ports. This introduces concurrency complexities that are totally real world (something that few real world programmers ever get a grip on) I actually want to print the manual. I don't really need to. But I want to. Just as a gimmick. For old times' sake.