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Ask HN: where to send a friend’s son for Programming 101?

3 points by mwsherman ↗ HN
I was with an old high-school friend this weekend and his son’s interest was piqued by the notion of learning programming, after I showed him a bit of code. The kid is 14 yo and suitably geeky, but has never coded.

I am happy to help teach (remotely) but I think that a) there are good resources out there and b) programming is largely solitary and c) I know more about programming than I do about education.

What is your most-recommended resource for learning programming, tabula rasa?

5 comments

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zachlatta
Does he play video games? Games are a great gateway drug to programming.

If he's interested in Minecraft, I'd buy him a Java book (I've heard good things about Head First Java) and help him work through that. Once he gets the gist of Java introduce him to the Minecraft modding community. He'll have a lot of fun making mods for both himself and his friends.

This strategy worked for a few people I know who are in his age group.

mcintyre1994
Most of the MOOC sites seem to have a CS101 course which is generally programming fundamentals. Udacity have a great one, which is basically building a search engine in Python. It doesn't hurt that one of its lecturers is a Googler.