Published in 1973, this textbook introduced structured programming concepts using PL/C, the teaching subset of PL/I developed at Cornell University. The "abecedarian" subtitle signals its intent as a genuine beginner's text — systematic, orderly, starting from first principles.
The book reflects Weinberg's persistent concern with programming-as-human-activity. Even in a technical textbook, the framing is about how humans think, learn, and make mistakes — not just about the syntax of PL/C. Structured programming was not merely a style preference but a cognitive strategy for keeping programs within the span of human understanding.
Coming two years after psychology-of-computer-programming-1971, this textbook applied some of those insights in an instructional setting. Weinberg was interested in how beginners form mental models of programs, and PL/C's error-recovery behavior made it forgiving enough for novice experimentation.
The choice of PL/C as the vehicle was practical and pedagogically motivated: it was widely available on IBM mainframes at universities, it produced useful error messages, and its subset nature reduced the cognitive load of the full PL/I language. The book occupies a moment in computing education just before structured programming became orthodoxy.