Learning how to program... but what's the best way?

[Paul Sage]

Depending on the interests, I have some other suggestions:

1)Gaming.  Have her pick up Neverwinter Nights and try her hand at the
scripting languages.  I recommend this because it has a very active
community to help her with questions.  The only problem with this is it
won't teach proper technique or discipline.  I recommend some parallel
learning with Python or something else.

2)Internet or Web Pages.  Flash.  Go with something that is going to be
visually exciting quickly.  Flash will start to point to some
programming basics, even if it has some pretty non-standard
functionality.

3)Straight programming.  Sign her up on Python and get her on the list.
I would especially recommend some community college pick up courses.
Then have her pick another interest and see how an oft repeated easily
automated task could help with that.

Of course, there may be several other interests, but those are my main
suggestions.