[hsm3]

Honest question: Does the kid really want learn via dealing with a book? Programming has such a wonderful virtuous feelback look built in, seems a shame to get in the way of that. My son learned a ton of programming mainly by building bigger and bigger things (with more and less help from me), and only after many years got to a point where researching a question on stackoverflow/etc started working for him. All the progress was well-motivated by the task at hand, not the next page of the book.

One tool that we found to be a very deep learning ground: an iPad app called Tynker. It is another block-based env like Scratch, though we found Tynker to have stronger primitives (e.g., you wind up forced to use globals to pass state around less often). Some big advantages: 1) iPad is super portable, so works when travelling 2) has an excellent physics engine built in - we made an Angry Birds clone 3) was strong enough to support making a piano app that can play concurrent tones. 4) Lots of samples shared by community for inspiration.