My 14 year old wants a Pi for his birthday. I am reasonably PC literate, but never really played with Linux etc – can anyone recommend me a kit or a set of components that I will need? He is into coding and gaming etc, so any good websites books or guides along that line welcome too.

Now’s your chance!

Assuming you already have a PC all you need is an SD card (and a USB keyboard for a couple of minutes while doing the first configuration. I also use the HDMI output to the TV for this bit). Then SSH (using PuTTY) from the laptop and use that to control the Pi from then on.

I bought a book but do most of my stuff off the web.

(I run a weather station with mine: http://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=ISTIRLIN11 built using instructions from here: http://www.weather.dragontail.co.uk/index.php?page=pywws_setup)

make sure it’s a pi-b-2 and not a pi-b+ or similar. confusing name structure but the pi-b-2 is the latest.

Allow him to make a case rather than buy, it’s part of the fun.

What does he want it for (mostly)? for the GPIO and as a controller for electronics projects? Or as a tiny computer for playing around with?

More as a computer for playing with i think. He is just getting into java-script and various other programming languages.