AppJet to introduce him to web app development (Score 1)

The best way to make programming interesting is to make it relevant. Everyone uses dynamic websites so I suggest teaching him to program for the web. There's no better teaching tool for how web-apps work, than AppJet.com IMO. You don't have to install anything to get started coding, not even a text-editor. Javascript is the only language he'll need to learn to use it. No SQL, no HTML, no Apache configs, just Javascript, a C based language with agile loose typing, and great OO capabilities. The AppJet developers have built a very minimalistic but stil powerful framework that covers all the fundamentals of web development; HTTP request/response handling, persistent storage, and sending emails, among many others. The forum has a friendly community of amateur developers to help him learn. He'll be writing web-apps that he can show his friends in no time! Give it a shot; http://appjet.com/ and check out something I built with it at http://juxtafier.com/