I think Richard Bird's Thinking Functionally with Haskell will be an excellent book to learn programming without having access to a computer. It'll teach him ho

I think Richard Bird's Thinking Functionally with Haskell will be an excellent book to learn programming without having access to a computer. It'll teach him how to think about programs as a set of simple equations, and also clearly demonstrates that Data Structure + Algorithms = Programs, a notion that easily gets forgotten to great detriment in imperative programming. It is very much an introductory text to programming, something that can be picked by someone who has an inclination to the craft but with no prior experience. It doesn't even get into Haskell's powerful type system and sticks to primitives and lists. The intention is to teach the building blocks of programming through small, pure functions. The text is very conversational, chapters are short and sweet, and have a lot of bite-sized exercises along with their answers which will greatly help a self-learner. It will also be easy to evaluate since functional code don't tend to get very verbose.