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.