Inspired 14 year old

I was at a bookshop yesterday looking for some books my kid bro needs when I wondered towards IT books. I always find myself doing this when I am in a bookshop or lib. Although I don't write code anymore I cant shake off the habit. Its kind of similar to the way I still find myself wondering to the toy car section when I am in a supermarket.

Anyway While checking out some of the books I noticed a young lad flippng through a book titled, 'Programming PHP and MySQL'. Next to him was a middle aged woman who I correctly assumed to be his mum. At some point the mum walked by me and I just had to ask if the book was for the boy and she replied that it was. When I asked her if he needed the book for school, she said that it wasnt and explained that since his dad got him a comp last year he has been spending all his time with it and had taught himself quite a lot. She added that the boy was 14.

I was really curious about the boy so I picked a conversation with him and he explained that he spends a lot of time on the comp, has been developing web sites for guys and while he already had a good understanding of PHP and MySQL he was looking to get a quick reference book.

A few weeks ago I downloaded MySQL with the intention of learning how to use it since every so often I have to work with data that is too large for Excel and Access and would be too slow to anaylse using audit software. However, I have not done anything with it since I installed it not even opened the sample database and here is a 14 year old who instead of playing or in addition to playing computer games is coding.