My first experience of programming was a 1970s 8085 kit with a hex keypad and a few digits of 7 segment LED display. The only book was Intel's technical reference manual for the 8085, and my first big project (a full year university project) involved conceiving the right program, writing it on paper in assembly language, hand assembling it, entering it as hex (a few hundred bytes). It worked first time because it pretty much had to work first time so I was very very careful.