Furthering my son's development into coding

He needs to to teach me.lol I'm in c# at school. I get most of my knowledge from examples and tweaking them.

See if you can reach out to the CS dept. at LSU and see if there are any students willing to tutor him. It might be great for him to have someone like that to talk to, discuss ideas with, and so on.

I always recommend codeacademy.com as well.

other self improvement/basic learning sites

LINK /

LINK (let's you get certified - like a college course)

Use your East Baton Rouge Parish Library Card to access the digital resources on their website (ebrpl.com). There are some really good trainings and other resources for coding out there. Finding out this site's existence has changed my life.

FWIW, if your son is legally able to work there are plenty of companies that would be glad to hire him for summer work. I work with one of the largest IT firms in the world and we had a guy like that a few years back, he worked full-time for us for two summers before he graduated and went to Carnegie Mellon.

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Tell him to go JavaScript and never look back.

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This. This. This. This. This. A million times this.

I knew JavaScript from the old days, but not too long after Node hit the scene, I went back and began to really dive into JS to get on the Node train. After a while, I began to live and breathe all things JS and Node.js. With modern Javascript engines like V8 and SpiderMonkey, the positives to learning and using Javascript seem endless. First of all, Javascript is compiled into machine code (via V8/SpiderMonkey) which means that it's pretty god damned fast. That's why you're starting to see things like 3D engines in the browser popping up all over the place. Secondly, there's seemingly infinite amounts of resources, libraries, plugins, tools, and everything else due to Javascript being an established language. These, for the most part, work well with platforms like Node. Third, Node.js (and IO.js) are really taking the development world by storm. I've mentioned it already a million times, but I absolutely love working with it. It's lead to stuff like the MEAN stack which makes development on a wide array of projects pretty simple. With templating engines like Jade and CSS extensions like Sass, it's as close as you can really to a monoglot programming experience. On top of this, Javascript development is blowing up in a great way. There's awesome new things coming out all of the times. Firebase really makes life easy for someone who doesn't feel comfortable with backend development. Recently, I've been really interested in React. Add tools like Grunt, Gulp, Vagrant, and a million others to the mix, and it just makes life so much easier. I could go on all day. Instead, I'm just going to second Meauxjeaux's comment.

Also, if he's learning Java, a lot of that will translate well to C# so it's beneficial to really give it a go. It isn't necessarily a proper course in C#, but learning a similar language will make it much easier for him to pick up C# in the future. In the end, most of the skills or languages he'll learn won't be from the classroom so it's not really important what languages he's learning. It's more important that he understands the concepts and what's going on behind the scenes.

As for learning, I really, really enjoy CodeSchool. I've done almost all of their courses from the most basic to their more advanced courses. Even if I know the topic (which is the case for most of them), I do the course just because I really enjoy the way they do it. I always end up learning something or picking up something I may have glossed over before. They really focus on best practices and instilling good programming habits instead of just getting it across using the easiest method possible. A lot of times, they'll take you from start to finish on a basic version of a project, and they also "make mistakes" that they refactor or debug explaining why a change may be necessary or preferable. They'll show a code snippet that technically works, but then they'll immediately point out why it may cause issues or why you'd want to choose a different method. On top of this, most of those courses have a follow up video, usually a few hours long, that go into far more detailed version of the project with the assumption you completed and understood the course. They'll take you from nothing to a deployed, best standards version of the project from the course.

They were bought by PluralSight, which is similar, but I don't like it as much. They tend to get a little bogged down during courses. I'm fine without the intro songs or little animations from CodeSchool, but a lot of the instructors on PluralSight lack charisma. I did a few courses there, including a refresher C# course, and I wasn't very impressed. Regardless, I definitely recommend them. I enjoy the courses a great deal even when a lot of it is refresher content for me so I think they'd really accelerate your son's development as a programmer. It's one thing to make things work and be able to create something, but it's another entirely to learn how to write code that is efficient and maintainable. Obviously, I don't know what stage your son is at in his development, but I know that when I look back at code from when I was younger and in his position, I cringe at how dreadful it really was. Really try to focus on giving him the tools to learn the proper way to program instead of just trying to expose him to a bunch of languages and "Build An App!" books/courses. If he focuses on writing great, maintainable code early on, he'll be on track to being a really talented programmer. He may not always pull it off, but as long as he's concerned about code quality, he'll be more aware of what's going on in his code. It's all about getting a good foundation early and not falling into the tons of traps for bad programming that are out there.

Hell, throw that boy in a room with a bash shell, C and C++ compilers, emacs, and don't let him out until he has become one with it. Just don't forget to feed him.

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Here's an EdX course specifically on C#, taught by Microsoft.
Programming with C#

I don't know this class specifically, but I'm a big fan of EdX.

He's on his second summer working for APSB as one of their IT Summer employees.

He is really interested in coding but loves working for his school. I will approach him on it though and see what he thinks.

That's a broad question and would really depend on the application type(s) you are looking to develop. For instance web applications use a combination of both client and server side code. Pure mobile apps require another skill set and development environment unless you are using a framework like Telerik's that can deploy anywhere. Visual Studio is a great start because you can use it to build windows and web apps using Javascript/Html5 and server side code like C#. Java and Python are just other implementations of interpreted script and server side code.

Ask him to look in to Harvard's cs50.

Also, I have a question, why c#? the reason why I ask is not because I'm against C # or any thing, but to me it seems like the problem you are running in to is that he is getting bored with the problems he is solving and not necessarily the language. So I wonder how much learning another language will help as opposed to working on more challenging stuff and for that I think python is perfectly good. most cs programs at starting to python for their first cs course.