My 14-year-old cousin came over to my place, woke me up, and asked me (a career software developer) "What should I learn now to become a computer scientist?" I didn't have a really good answer for him. I told him to pay attention to algebra, take a class in symbolic logic if he could find one, and take any programming classes he could find. I started learning to program in college (not counting little games in BASIC and hello-world level stuff in C growing up). I'm sure there's plenty of good teach-yourself-to-program books aimed at people his age, but I don't know what they are.<p>TL;DR: What does HN recommend as a course of study for an aspiring young pre-CS student?
MIT's OpenCourseWare is an excellent way for him to study CS on his own while in high school.<p>I would recommend, at 14, getting him utterly hooked on the mindset of CS and related subjects. Godel, Escher, Bach, etc. If you can get him fascinated with the field, he'll find all the information he needs on his own better than any list of required reading you'll get.<p><a href="http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm" rel="nofollow">http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm</a><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465026567" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465026567</a>
Does he want to study computer science or software engineering? If he wants to study computer science he should take lots of math, particularly courses that involve proofs. I recommend algebra, graph theory, and combinatorics in particular. I'd recommend Haskell or SML as programming languages since they have so much theory behind them. Haskell has a great community and is really nice to use, but SML is simpler to start with and has a concise definition.
I'd recommend the little schemer: <a href="http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/</a><p>I think if I'd seen this book when I was about that age, I'd have <i>loved</i> computer science.
Get a TI calculator and try making some simple games for it in TI Basic. The calculator is nice because you can program in your not-so-great history classes or whatever.<p>Also start messing around with Python, there is no overhead and you can get started quickly.<p>Paying attention to math is important, but more important is honing your problem solving skills.<p>(Addressed everything to the OPs cousin for readability)
Well maybe he doesn't understand the differences between:
computer scientist<p>computer programmer<p>software engineer<p>You might think they are the same thing but they're not. A computer scientist would end up in academia doing research. A computer programmer writing programs and a software engineer design then building systems.<p>Learning to program for a budding computer scientist is the worst possible thing to do. It contaminates the mind with what ever preconceptions the chosen language may provide. Ok, maybe Lisp and Scheme not so much - but still ...