Designing with JavaScript by Nick Heinle was one of my first book purchases. I studied the crap out of it in middle school. Javascript is great as intro. Kids

Designing with JavaScript by Nick Heinle was one of my first book purchases. I studied the crap out of it in middle school. Javascript is great as intro. Kids are naturally drawn to shiny things and you can create plenty of shiny stuff with Javascript with minimal setup. Once you hit the natural limit("how do I save the scores!"), you can move on to PHP/python etc.