[porter]

This is dead on. Code School, Treehouse, etc. are all excellent learning resources. As are the in person bootcamps that teach you basic programming for roughly $10,000 and 3 months of your life.

But the one thing that traditional computer science education has over all of these sources is that they teach the really hard courses: algorithms, data structures, and discrete math.

The reason why Treehouse and the others don't teach this online is because it is incredibly difficult to teach these courses online. Udacity doesn't even do a great job (and they are the best in my opinion). What elevates the thinking of a programmer is a deep understanding of these topics. And, as far as I know and have experienced, the only way to gain this understanding is to struggle for months through problem sets, proofs, and dense textbooks. Gamified "programming for everyone" websites will give you tactics, but not strategy. This might be fine for your purposes, but please realize this: programming is not for everyone.