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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dvvega" data-source="post: 2263008" data-attributes="member: 524">As noted previously, it would all depend on what he seems to want to do.Hardware support techies make a decent wage/living repairing corporate machines and demand a fair amount of respect (at least in my country and current workplace). The fact that he put his machine together himself means that he has an interest in mechanical things (using your hands).Programming is something entirely different. It is creating things that do other things using a programming language. Any programming language will do the job, some are just easier to learn than others. Personally I know 7 or 8 languages. I can categorically state 5 of them I know extremely well, while the other 2 or 3 I know well enough to write applications in them but I wouldn't say they would be perfect. That leads me to the statement I have given to many people who try to argue one language better than another: it doesn't matter what language you use, if you're a programmer you will be able to use it to accomplish what you need. Does he really want to follow the path of programming? Has anyone asked him this question? If I was to through languages out it would be PHP, the .NET suite, and Visual Basic to start with. Any one of these is pretty easy to get into. PHP can lead to Java and C because of the design of the language (which borrows heavily from both languages).In fact have you asked him at all what he would like to do next? Do you want to build another machine? Do you want to learn how to make games? Etc etc.As to the database suggestion, almost every application I've run into/programmed on in the last 10 years has had a database somewhere in the chain. I've worked in Mechanical Engineering firms, Government companies, Scientific Research, straight programming houses, and all of them use a database somewhere that needs to be accessed. Learning SQL is something than can be done in conjunction with learning a programming language. Access to corporate funding/machinery is not required at all. For example you can download MySQL for free and learn SQL that way using either the command line tools or one of a variety of free utilities like phpMyAdmin. You can download a trial of Sql Server from Microsoft. And I'm sure you can download various other databases. Microsoft Office comes with Access in the Professional version so there is another database program. I personally teach SQL Server at a technical college part-time and it is a pretty easy thing to get into. You can even learn administration of the SQL Server and thus gain other skills that can put you into a DBA position.There is another path and that is the Jack of All Trades. He has shown aptitude for hardware, if he shows aptitude for programming and databases etc he could well be on his way to be a consultant of some sort that understands all the aspectof the I.T. industry and can sort out the B.S. some techie is spouting from the truth. Now this is something that people forked out money for hand over fist for.Well I see I have rambled on ... so I can leave it there. Just to make it clear, however, I am not advocating or going against Microsoft at all. It is just a fact of life that Microsoft is the biggest used thing around, and some of its products are easy to get into (Visual Basic, Access) for example. I personally use a Macintosh so that should clear up any imagined bias from anything I've said.D</blockquote>

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