Thanks for your message and the kind words. This is our second batch. We trained 12 students in our first class, and 16 in the second (graduated on Friday). Our students do have the qualities you mentioned: ambition, drive, strong work ethic, and technical aptitude. I think it helps that they are surrounded by a supportive and encouraging community.

Please tell me someone fat fingered(the comment above is in gray), and this relevant, non-rude comment isn't really getting downvoted.

Looking into the article, they don't start from zero:

It helps that Hackbright students usually aren’t starting from scratch, but have instead developed their initial skills using Codecademy or by attending development workshops. After all, Phillips said, Hackbright is for people who are serious about programming as a profession, and you can’t decide that you’re serious until you’ve tried it out.

So as I see it's for somebody who knows some basic programming but wants to get some skills that would get her hired.

I think you would be surprised to know what level I started at. Everything I had learned about backend development was passed up within two or three days, and that Friday we went over HTML and CSS, which passed up everything I knew about that. Hackbright is, of course, no easy road. In fact, I can easily say it was harder than all of my AP courses in high school, harder than moving to a German city where I knew no one, harder than deciding to jump into the marriage boat (trust me, that was difficult), and harder than even the decision to make such an investment. And that's why it's worth it. Of course we'll all continue learning, just as every programmer does, but Hackbright was a fabulous kick in the right direction.

FWIW, a friend of mine graduated in this cohort.

She has a physics degree from Duke, and back when we were freshmen together, was considering majoring in CS, among other technical majors. I'm not sure how representative she is of the batch, but for people with existing technical skills/background, 10 weeks of focused coding practice + feedback could be a pretty big help.

I'm just waiting for the guys who decide, "If Hackbright can train full-fledged programmers in 10 weeks, we can do it in 5"

5 weeks? That's practically a lifetime! Nothing tops "Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 10 Minutes":

http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-Minutes-2nd/dp/067...

Agree. With Sams all you need is about an hour, and you could know all this:

"Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes" - http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-Minutes-Edition/dp...

"Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 10 Minutes" - http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-PHP-Minutes/dp/067...

"Sams Teach Yourself UNIX in 10 Minutes" - http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-Minutes-Yourself/d...

"Sams Teach Yourself AJAX in 10 Minutes" - http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-AJAX-Minutes/dp/06...

"Sams Teach Yourself HTML in 10 Minutes" - http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-Minutes-Edition/dp...

"Sams Teach Yourself CSS in 10 Minutes" - http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-CSS-Minutes/dp/067...

"Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes" - http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Yourself-Regular-Expressions-Min...

"Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft SQL Server T-SQL in 10 Minutes" - http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Yourself-Microsoft-Server-Minute...

No need for 5 year at the university to get a computer science master.

They also have the same with "24 hours"... For the slow readers among us I guess. Given the 10-minute book on PHP has 264 pages, it's about 26 pages per minute, or a little more than 2 seconds per page, not counting the time it takes to turn the pages. One must be really quick.

Come now, reading the book doesn't teach you PHP- buying it does!

Well, I concede buying this book probably will teach one something... but I doubt it'd be PHP.