No, it is true. People learn to code from absolutely nothing all the time with my books. Depending on their motivation they then go on to make all kinds of stuff.
They're not public, but I used LPTHW and went on to work on a few Django apps dealing with GIS and criminal intelligence analysis. Aside from the web front end, the projects involved a lot of analytical code, and LPTHW was great for getting me thinking in the Python way.
I'm not a language zealot, Python just had the robust GIS, math, and other libs I needed.