Ask HN: Advice for 14-year-old who wants to learn to code?

My younger brother who is a high school freshman wants to get started learning how to code.

He has no experience with writing code and little general computer knowledge about stuff like OS's file systems, etc. Basically he would be starting from scratch.

What would be a good place for him to get started? I'd like to give him some resources so he can learn at his own pace, but I also don't want him to get overwhelmed and decide coding is too hard.

Thanks

I did http://tryruby.org/ with a friend. She understands better now what I do and what I mean by 'variables' but never touched code again.

My son, who is a little younger than your brother, wanted to learn to code and I tried a number of things but they didn't really stick. He kept "wanting to" but never really learned past regurgitating the tutorial. Finally, he picked up my TI NSpire CX CAS and started playing with it. For us really old guys it's like the next, next, next gem TI 82 graphing calculator.

The TI has always included a programming language and interpreter in their calculators. It used to be "TI Basic" but now it is full Lua. They have hundreds of example programs to look and and learn from and tutorials galore.

The thing that finally made it click for him was, he could take this little handheld machine anywhere and whenever a programming thought struck him he could try it. Soon he was building reusable functions and libraries of reusable functions and everything clicked.

Now he's transferring a lot of that knowledge to other languages, most recently Python, without any trouble at all. I would recommend it to anyone with a kid who is interested in learning.

If he's interested in games, buy him a book about game programming in a language that you know and would recommend for beginners. I got started programming because I wanted to build games and made the mistake of starting with web development.

Chances are that moment he makes a shape move on his computer, he'll be hooked. At least that's what happened to me.

If there's a CodeDay (https://codeday.org/) near you, bring him to it. It's a nonprofit 24 hour hackathon for high schoolers. He'll meet a bunch of other people his age who are also into programming and will build and present a project by the end of the weekend. In the past we've had participants build everything from a breakout clone to a bootable OS in pure x86 assembly, so there'll be a wide range of skill levels and he'll see his peers building incredible things. Disclaimer: I'm one of the organizers of CodeDay LA.

There's also a Facebook group filled with other high schoolers who are into programming (https://www.facebook.com/groups/PennAppsHS/). If he has a Facebook, send me a link to his profile to my email (in my profile), and I'll add him to the group.

I'm also high school-aged and, if appropriate, would be more than happy to talk with him. Feel free to reach out to me through my email (again, in my profile).

Also see http://www.paulgraham.com/pfaq.html.