[sdegutis]

My 11 year old son has been programming in Scratch for a few years, and kind of hit a dead end. So we recently bought him Sams Teach Yourself Mod Development for Minecraft in 24 Hours. It goes straight into some pretty heavy Java, but with a lot of hand-holding. He's really loving it so far, and seems to be learning a lot and making good progress.

[ciroduran]

There's this Greenfoot (http://www.greenfoot.org/) environment I've been hearing about. It has a visual interface that allows you to put sprites and assemble a game, but it also has Java foundations. It might be another option for that transition between a visual tool and a programming language.

[zappo2938]

Have you tried Code Combat? [1] Or, Vim Adventures? [2] Of course, you might skip the vim because real programmers use emacs.

[1] https://codecombat.com

[2] http://vim-adventures.com/

[sdegutis]

We all know real programmers use butterflies. I've been letting my son focus on the code rather than the editor, so he's using Eclipse per the aforementioned book's recommendation.