I feel like if Codecademy just made really awesome video tutorials for installing Python or Ruby, setting up rails or Django, using FTP, setting up MAMP, etc. then that would be sufficient to get people started after doing Codecademy.

Lynda.com and Treehouse both do those, but ultimately for me Google searches and blog tutorials generally win out (especially for Linux configuration).

Treehouse is awesome, it's just expensive. I recommend Treehouse very strongly if you want to build a career-level skill out of programming. Treehouse fucking rules.

I do ALWAYS recommend starting to Codecademy just to see if programming itself gets you off and to get your feet wet. Even now I still use it for that.

Incidentally, I still don't know how to use Ruby or Python functionally, so that's a pretty big failing of my learning so far. Like, I can write Python and Ruby scripts way better than Php, but Php is always installed and configured on every server and I know exactly how to use it in my dev environment, so I always default to that.

I'm making a Twitter App right now, and for speed I'm using a PHP API wrapper that is way worse than just writing the requests in Ruby. But. I don't know how to actually USE Ruby.

That felt good to say out loud, er, on the Internet.

That right there is the problem with Treehouse vs. Lynda - Lynda tends to have a decent chapter on setup, installation and gotchas... but to be honest, paper books have weaned me off Treehouse. I think their front-end stuff was great, but I can't help but feel that their back-end (read: Ruby/Rails) content was lacking.

Exactly. I recommend something like Codecademy to absolute beginners because it helps build muscle memory and gets your fingers wet. It helps you pass that initial mental paralysis where you're staring cluelessly at the screen. Codecademy needs to double down on these benefits and specialize for beginners (while making their limitations clear) or launch follow-up tutorials to help people advance and actually build real-world projects.

I think Codecademy is great for people who already know how to code a little bit. I can use Codecademy to learn HTML/CSS or about using APIs. However, I think for a complete neophyte, a book like Learn Python the Hard Way is significantly better. Someone HAS to walk you through setting up a programming environment, running an interpreter or compiling, etc. It can be incredibly frustrating and intimidating for first timers.

My friend Daniel says the same thing, he started with Codecademy and moved to Learn Python the Hard Way, and he definitely says they both had their merits but Learn Python the Hard Way got him to actually being able to code.

However, LPTHW wouldn't have made sense to him if he hadn't already done CA, so he liked having done them both.

I'm don't think I agree with this, I've been giving Codecademy a try recently to learn Python. I don't feel like I am any closer to actually building anything useful because all it has taught me is some syntax. I think the issue is because I already know just enough (from taking a course on C) to know how to solve the problems they give, but don't really know how to extend it to actually make something useful.

If I knew nothing about programming then I would find the basics of coding that Codecademy teaches to be useful as it is a different way of problem solving that needs to be learned.