Hi Gabor! The story tells that when king Ptolmey I of Egypt came to the famous philosopher/mathematician Euclid to learn Geometry, then Euclid started teaching him the basic principles of geometry from the beginning with a lot of rigour. Ptolmey got tired of it and asked Euclid if there was an easier way. So Euclid told him "There is no royal road to Geometry.". I'm not sure I fully agree that teaching needs to be as rigorous as this, but it is something that ought to be considered. When I was somewhat younger than your son (insert reference to the Four Yorkshiremen sketch here), my friends and I programmed in BASIC for the PC XT - first on the ROM and then using the various DOS BASICs (i.e: basic.com, GWBASIC, or BASICA). The Internet and the Web did not exist back then and we exchanged data using diskettes. What was true was that we learned programming in a fun way by writing games, programs to display graphics on the screen, etc. But we still had a lot of patience to learn programming deeply instead of in a shallow way. I'd like to create a namespace of Perl packages for such pedagogical purposes and upload it to CPAN, but due to my abundance of interests, did not get to it yet. I also think one problem with my Perl for Newbies series is that I don't discuss any real-world uses of Perl up to the 6th part (which I didn't write yet). Nevertheless, I think it's still important to have your son understand that learing anything may require quite a lot of hard-work (which still may be a lot of fun as the opposite of play is not work.). I also think that it's hard to learn how to program (or almost anything) without a good knowledge of English, especially in Israel which has too few resources to translate everything to Hebrew, and considers it a high priority that people will know English well. I also found that using the computer, proved to be a good way for me to improve my English. Anyway, these are my thoughts worth 20 Agoroth.