As learning programming courses requires substantial self learning on top of the normal classroom lectures, supporting semantic search of programming related materials on the Web is seen to be one of the ways that can possibly enhance students' learning ability. Hence, in this research, an ontology of programming related materials is aimed to be developed. Once completed, the ontology will be embedded into an existing search engine to help students to do more effective search. However, as this research is a work in progress, in this paper, only the preliminary study and the development methodology of the ontology will be shared. The methodology involves rigorous participation of the domain experts and the results of evaluation by them are also presented in this paper. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.