[smhenderson]

My son has been working with Code Academy recently. I've only briefly looked at it so hopefully someone else will correct me if I'm wrong.

A lot of what they have available is web based - e.g. learning javascript, html, php, css, etc.

IMHO you would be better off starting with python (or maybe ruby), which is also available at Code Academy. Learn to make simple programs on the command line before you jump into higher level languages and combining them with mark up. And, really, python is pretty high level as well so the learning curve shouldn't be too steep.

I started with Visual Basic many years ago and in hindsight I didn't really "get" programming by learning VB. I did some great stuff with it but until I learned some C and Perl I really didn't understand much about what goes on at the OS level. Once I learned to do things "the hard way" doing things with VB, javascript and combining Perl and HTML made a lot more sense to me and made it easier to step back and debug when things went wrong.