Not at all, I kinda see where you're coming from. But the flaw in your reasoning is that we're not yet at the point where you can jack the kung fu program into

Not at all, I kinda see where you're coming from. But the flaw in your reasoning is that we're not yet at the point where you can jack the kung fu program into Neo's cerebral cortex like they did in the Matrix. You can actually learn anything for free today -- assuming that your time is worthless. You might not be able to learn it well or very quickly, but you can certainly learn it for free. CodeLesson's biggest competitor is Google. Google can get you all the information you need about how to do pretty much anything -- bake a soufflé, sire a baby, write a compiler. But it won't tell you where to look for the information you want, it won't tell you exactly what you don't yet know, it won't evaluate your work, it won't tell you when you've learned enough to do what you want, and it won't validate what you've learned. That's where a human instructor comes in. If you think that paying to take a course is expensive, then great -- read the online text for free and get what you can out of that. That's what it's there for. But taking a class is really about getting access to the knowledge and experience of an instructor. That's what people pay for.