I'll have a page on the site they go to for the first exercise, so it's always updated with the latest best starter thing to do.

However, the #1 problem all the people I've tested this on have is getting basic gear going. The simple act of just "write, run, fix" is even daunting. The goal of this section is to give them a very simple set of things to do so they can get to just enough working gear to do write, run, fix.

That "immediate gratification" just doesn't exist anymore. It existed for BASIC because Microsoft included it for free for years, so no install needed. These days there just isn't something like that out there.

The only exception to this would be a Javascript book. But, javascript is such a giant nasty mess it would be hard to teach things like this. Without good error messages, syntax errors, etc. it'd be pointless to teach it.