As someone who was there and did that I want to refute that assumption :) I have typed in many programs and there's not a lot to learn because most of them consisted of many pages of DATA lines and a small loop that loaded those machine instructions into the home computer's memory and started the program by a USR directive
On the Beeb most listings were BASIC with all the logic there and DATA statements just for in-game assets such as sprites or room descriptions in a text adventure. All the Osbourne books are online now , check them out https://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2016/02/usborne-releases-1... many happy memories inside!