Some others suggested Lego Mindstorms, C++ books, and programming games.. and those are all great. I am in college now, and I fondly remember dabbling into all of those things for a little while.
Somewhere in high school I got into web design, making some simple PHP scripts that show random quotes, and now I am doing things with PHP + MySQL databases, and pretty AJAX calls.
I have seen a trend in programming (and don't quote me because I am probably biased), but more and more applications are becoming web based. Look at Gmail, Google Docs, etc... its awesome to have everything you own online, accessible from any computer, anywhere, and the only thing you need is a web browser. And like 6Yankee said.. its great for showing off to your friends because you can just send them a link with the latest project you are working on. Teenagers these days are on the web checking their facebook all day anyway, but they might be a little hesitant to getting on their email, downloading a mysterious EXE, and running it. (BTW, what runs on Firefox will run on Firefox. Whether it's on XP, Vista, Mac, Linux)
Now it depends on your son, but if hes anything like me then he hates reading programming books. For me, PHP is seriously easy to learn because you can Google anything you are trying to do, and someone has already done it. And of course, PHP, MySQL, and Apache are all free, open source, and Linux based. Good luck getting him motivated! But at the same time don't force him.. for me it was more fun to really want to learn on my own.
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Agreed.
Some others suggested Lego Mindstorms, C++ books, and programming games.. and those are all great. I am in college now, and I fondly remember dabbling into all of those things for a little while.
Somewhere in high school I got into web design, making some simple PHP scripts that show random quotes, and now I am doing things with PHP + MySQL databases, and pretty AJAX calls.
I have seen a trend in programming (and don't quote me because I am probably biased), but more and more applications are becoming web based. Look at Gmail, Google Docs, etc... its awesome to have everything you own online, accessible from any computer, anywhere, and the only thing you need is a web browser. And like 6Yankee said.. its great for showing off to your friends because you can just send them a link with the latest project you are working on. Teenagers these days are on the web checking their facebook all day anyway, but they might be a little hesitant to getting on their email, downloading a mysterious EXE, and running it. (BTW, what runs on Firefox will run on Firefox. Whether it's on XP, Vista, Mac, Linux)
Now it depends on your son, but if hes anything like me then he hates reading programming books. For me, PHP is seriously easy to learn because you can Google anything you are trying to do, and someone has already done it. And of course, PHP, MySQL, and Apache are all free, open source, and Linux based. Good luck getting him motivated! But at the same time don't force him.. for me it was more fun to really want to learn on my own.