I agree with much of what you said. I self-taugh that way (Codecademy). I teach my nieces this way. However, If I had it to do again I would have started with iOS - my current profession - or Android, simply because the IDE is more defined. Web technology is all over the place. Unless you wrote vanilla JS, you could spend more time fretting over if AngularJS is the way to go if XYZ is better... Sure it was difficult to go from JS to C/Objective-C but if I had considered that from the start I wouldn't have lost the first three months confused about differences between Ruby/Python and JS.