I have a school-age family member who is interested in programming, but does not have internet access.<p>As a beyond-last-minute Christmas gift, I'd like to make a CD, DVD, or thumb drive (as needed) with programming tools he can use offline.<p>He has access to Windows PC that was probably mid-grade when they got it about 3 years ago.<p>Can you suggest any environments or tutorials that are simple enough for a beginner and can be used without internet and without any major changes to the computer (such as installing IIS)
Python for windows has a lot of batteries included, docs are available, and you can add any other docs you can think of via wget or other site crawling. Grab some of the online free books. Consider (strongly!) adding PyGame and any relevant documentation you can snarf, and poke around with Google for things like "learning python" and such. Take the extra moment to poke around for docs, when you can't just look things up it's much harder.
Try converting some tutorials as pdf's. I'm learning python. I've been able to convert "Learn python the hard way" and "Invent with Python" into pdf's which I then save on my desktop. Check out this HN member's page <a href="http://krainboltgreene.github.com/l/2/" rel="nofollow">http://krainboltgreene.github.com/l/2/</a> for possible tutorials.
you can do what candre717 said, but instead of converting to PDF's just save the page as HTML.
The programming tools he will use really depend on the language you're aiming at, most have distributable installers, and if you give him/her this combined with the tutorials I think he/she will be a happy camper.<p>C++ <a href="http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/</a><p>C# <a href="http://www.csharp-station.com/default.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.csharp-station.com/default.aspx</a>