[pohart]

I agree that you can't learn to program from sitting in lectures, but they can help you. They can help especially in conjunction with well chosen programming assignments. Most programming assignments are designed to introduce you to new topics in algorithms or data-structures. This allows you to expand your abilities more quickly that you would on your own. Learning ruby simultaneously will hopefully help jmonegro learn some of the shortcomings of java. The projects probably won't be large enough for him to see many disadvantages in ruby. ruby really shines in the kind of small programs people normally write when first learning a language (among other areas).