That's actually really good advice. Agree completely that finding a good canonical source that takes away all possible ways to get derailed is awesome.
The only thing I'd say is that I do think web dev is still the best thing to learn first when getting intro programming for two reasons: There's something about having what you've made out on the internet for anyone to see, that has a URL attached to it that is much more rewarding that writing something that lives purely in your own computer. The second reason I think webdev is very good is because there's a huge job market out there for it for which the barrier to entry is fairly low. I think it'd be very hard to get a job as a backend engineer with 0 experience being self taught, vs starting out in front-end web-dev (not that one is harder than the other!).