I disagree with the notion that there is a huge gap. I originally learned to program via QBasic in 21 days. DOS in 21 days. VB 6 in 21 days. ASP in 21 days. Bo

I disagree with the notion that there is a huge gap. I originally learned to program via QBasic in 21 days. DOS in 21 days. VB 6 in 21 days. ASP in 21 days. Borland C++ in 21 days. HTML 5 in 21 days. PHP+MySQL in 21 days. Because that's what we had! The books came with CDs of code examples and compilers you could try that worked on windows. And by the end of the book, you had a working chat program. Was it great code? Secure? Scalable? Efficient? We'll never know because that code is long gone. But I wrote quite a few chat servers, hit counters, and dentists' websites back in my day. And that is basically what "Learn Python the Hard Way" is. Teaches you the basics, builds up to some neat little projects, and since most of the software problems in the world are variants on "how do I loop through a list of blog entries and display it in a table" then I am not convinced that this is a complex enough problem that 21-dayers can't come up with a good data representation. For the vast majority of us who will never ever face scaling problems, not understanding the cost of a hash table lookup is perfectly okay for an MVP. The stuff you learn in school is completely valuable. But sometimes I feel like the things I learned (caching algorithms, design patterns, etc) put me in a mode of "spend a lot of time trying to architect" rather than "building something that works and upload to github." "Just learn to code" emphasizes the latter, and I think that is a good thing.