Should a new programmer focus on a single technology until he's proficient at it? [closed]

Question

Ok, I've been teaching a buddy how to program for a while now. He's a very fast learner, and he's quite good at programming so far. However, he has one "issue" I keep trying to correct.

He jumps in and starts doing highlevel programming without learning some of the basics (He's created a full blown web application but still doesn't know pagination or session management).

This isn't the problem though. He keeps jumping around to new technology (Node.js, MongoDB, EC2, etc). I tried telling him that he should learn some of the basics about his RDMS of choice (MySQL) as he uses it everyday before investing a bunch of time into learning the basics of MongoDB (And probably moving to something new).

Am I the one in the wrong here, or should he try to focus on one thing at a time and get really good at it?