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Recommendations for a 14 years old intelligent boy: where can he start in PCs?

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Guy:
If you give him anything too difficult, too soon, he may give up.

It may be a good idea to install Tinycore with him there, and explain what you are doing, so he will understand a lot of it. If he understands it, he should enjoy it.

Lee:
I agree with dubcore - start him out with a "Hello, World!" program in a couple of different languages, maybe C and shell script.  I'd avoid starting him out with anything graphical right at the beginning.  Maybe not drivers just yet.

I'd be interested in any additional advice in this thread as I have a couple of twelve-year-old boys who see a computer only in terms of games and I'd like to get them interested in the basics of network setup, programming, databases, etc.  They are home-schooled, so I'd like to start out easy and advance as far as time takes us.

Rich:
Hi Lee
C's not too bad a way to go. There are many on-line tutorials for C (and other languages) that provide
enough background in about a dozen short chapters to get you started. The contents in this link
http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/cclass/notes/top.html are based on K&Rs "The C Programming Language".
A very good tutorial on pointers, arrays, strings, and memory allocation can be found here
http://pweb.netcom.com/~tjensen/ptr/pointers.htm

When choosing a language, you may want to consider the ability to set up compile environments to
generate code to run under both Windows and Linux, to aid them in learning how to write portable
code.

Another possibility is to look into microprocessor or micro-controller development boards. Many of
the chip makers offer these boards at fairly reasonable prices. Some boards even have audio, network
and USB connectors. Just a thought, in case you want to take them down the embedded route.

Lee:
K&R...  I actually have a copy of "the new testament" from back when they still had to have the disclaimer "Based on the Draft-Proposed ANSI C".  Someone once gave me a Xeroxed copy of the "old testament" but I think I pitched it when I bought the new one.

Developmment boards... embeddable SBC's are a great place to start.  I had tons of fun with a Z-80 board a few years back but I don't have it any more.

Portability ... ANSI C is great for that.   ...and doesn't the gcc have flags to produce whatever kind of output you want?

My big challenge is to get these guys -interested- in programming before they realize that girls don't all have cooties, 'cause at that point they'll be lost.  :)

Rich:
Hi Lee

--- Quote ---Portability ... ANSI C is great for that.   ...and doesn't the gcc have flags to produce whatever kind of output you want?
--- End quote ---
Actually those flags are for producing code for different processors, not operating systems. For
that you want a cross compiler, see   http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,10997.0.html

The trick is to think up a project that will hold their interest while stimulating their ability to solve
problems. While it won't hold their interest, here's an example. I wanted to add a readout to my
heating system to tell me how much fuel I'd consumed so I wouldn't have to check the tank with
the dipstick. I built a board with four 7-segment displays, a couple of switches, and a PIC16c55
processor. The PIC has 512 bytes EPROM, 24 bytes RAM, 20 I/O pins, and an 8 bit counter with an
8 bit prescaler. The program multiplexes and encodes the displays segments, polls the switches,
monitors the fuel pump, keeps track of elapsed time, and computes fuel used. The integer math
routines I wrote calculate time and fuel usage to one decimal place. There are 6 different nozzle
sizes to choose from for the fuel computation. This is a RISC processor with 33 instructions and
a two level stack.

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