My son wants me to teach him Python

[russ.pobox at gmail.com]

I couldn't read every post here so don't know if this has been suggested, or if there is perhaps a better suggestion which I haven't read in this thread, but in as far as I've read I feel the need to recommend:
learnpythonthehardway.org

Knowing a little JavaScript and even allot of HTML doesn't take him out of the total noob category when it comes to programming (did someone say game programming? Hold your horses!). I took a visual basic course (which I dropped out of admittedly after 3 months) and still knew absolutely nothing, which isn't necessarily just because I'm dumb.

After eventually learning Python in incremental and sporadic episodes of free time, I did come across a few resources and by virtue of the frustration of having taken so long to learn to code in the easiest damn programming language to learn, I found myself scrutinizing allot of the tutorials I'd been passing by.

I noticed developers.google.com somewhere up there. That's just a no no. Sorry. Maybe some of the people here are more than "pretty smart" but there's a good chance it'll be over his head at first, and at first is a bad place to be in over your head when you're learning the fundamentals.

I also notice Invent with python. I personally would go for 2.x rather than 3 but that aside, for reasons I'm too tired to word, I didn't find it a good fit for me. I takes a "dive right in" approach and well, I never did learn to swim.

Udacity was the third suggestion I noticed. This is also a no no. I completed the cs101 udacity course which I'm sure is the course in question here, and I loved it! Really I learn crap load from it, but at every step I asked myself, would this had helped if it was the first place I went to to learn to code? No. There were allot of gaps I noticed when looking from a complete beginners perspective and even though the course claims to has no prerequisites, I would have hated if I started with that. However that was last year and I think it was only a few months old, so it may be allot different now, I haven't checked.

I read How to think like a computer scientist, A byte of python, and even the official docs. The only one I came across that made me say "&*#! why didn't I google that?" was learnpythonthehardway.

I do think it depends a great deal on the individual, and for me personally, that style of learning was just it. For one you learn from the bottom up. It's a compulsion for some to know that that know a thing before they're brave enough to move forward. In cases where a "leap" is the only way forward, the tutor pulls you across that divide by your ankles. You feel a sense of obligation to take to his instruction. And above all, it greatly emphasizes the "learn by doing" approach, in small steps, not big projects that you end up completing just to get through it but don't learn much from.

So that's my recommendation. But all that aside, my biggest point would be, just pick one do it. As you can see if you read that, my biggest flaw was simply the lack of devotion to one path.

Game programming if he still wants to do that is another question entirely I feel. Fundamentals are fundamentals. The only variable is how long it might take him to get passed it. Even with Python, some people just never get it.