[reneighbor]

I do agree with this. However, I think most online tutorials and books are skewed towards being not intellectually stimulating. Very much, "This is a loop. This is how you print." Barf.

The Stanford 106a track for CS freshmen is excellent. The curriculum is more bite-size than doing a project from top to bottom, so they introduce elements slowly (arrays only come up 3/4 into the class for example). However they design problems that really poke your problem-solving brain and challenge you to solve it with the limited tools you've learned.

Here's the first assignment. A former TA says that problem (3) from this book is the most intellectually challenging of the whole course, and it's from before you've learned anything about any language: http://see.stanford.edu/materials/icspmcs106a/07-assignment-...

I think a (good) class teaches depth while a project gets you up and teaches breadth. If you do a web project, you'll learn about frameworks, hosting, using different libraries, etc but the actual code you write will be rudimentary. Both are important of course.