I am asking on this forum as this is to my experience a great community - The question is not for me (I did 10 years or so in corporate and web programming and are now in PM, just fiddling with programming hobby stuff) but for a young relative.

He is fancying a career change and wants to understand "what it is like to be a programmer" - He is reasonable at maths, and has good skills with computers - but no programming skills.

He is signing up on some classes for it, but I wanted to maybe point him to a few simple tutorials - maybe stuff you would give to kids or early teens.

But rather than just trusting google for this I wanted to see if there are any recommendations from this community - Note this is more general programming than games specifically.

What language? The faq's has a link to the python site which has tutorials.

If your friend is pretty smart then I recommend pointing him towards the learn the hard way website: http://learncodethehardway.org.

Here he has a choice of several languages to use Python, Ruby or C and would also pick up a few other skills used in the real world by programmers. Rather than teaching him a few "fluffy" tutorials it would teach him what program in the field is really like.

Good input, thanks guys - I was indeed thinking "Fluffy" but you make valid points as that would have less real world applications.

I would say C# or Java as languages in that case.