[gaelow]

Tell him to join a local open source community and learn to work in group projects and to code in a team close to other people (Like the GDG, for example. It's free and in my town every week or two they organize meetings, hackatons, workshops and many interesting talks which they post on youtube in case you cannot attend that day). He can be useful even if he knows nothing, by being assigned the most trivial tasks or watch and help. Tell him to find a mentor and to get used to version control, code reviews, test writing, quality assessment, applying design patterns. Those are every bit as important as just learning how to code algorithms. I believe coding by yourself tends to make you a "bad" coder, in the sense that unless you are amazingly self disciplined you can take on a lot of bad habits that are very difficult to get rid off later on.