[nicholas73]

I don't think the two ways are mutually exclusive... in fact I'd say both are needed. I started out trying to throw up a quick website in Wordpress and Drupal, and found out I couldn't set it up the way I liked. So I taught myself to code with resources including CodeAcademy. Now I can build a site pretty much from scratch, hosted on my own server or GAE.

Without my struggles with CMS or frameworks, I wouldn't have known what to code. But without the likes of Udacity and CA, I wouldn't have known how to code it. But, I can now write a functioning webapp after half a year, while working full time. I doubt that would have happened with just books/tutorials or even a university course.

For what it is, these are great learning tools. I can't fault them for not being designed to make you into a full stack developer, yet.

Though I still couldn't have done it without StackOverflow :)

[ahulak]

I could not agree with you more.

I think it is absolutely crucial that you have a real world project to work on - something that makes you actually write some code and solve some problems in a production environment. That being said, supplemental education that focuses on fundamentals can drastically speed up the learning process.

It's almost like practicing a sport. There are drills you need to run in order to improve specific skills, but without taking those skills and applying them in a real game situation you never actually connect all the dots that lead to self improvement. On the flip side, its not enough to just play games - sometimes it helps to go the batting cages and practice on a specific skill set. I treat my learning the same way.