I agree with this up to a point. Probably the best programming book I ever worked through was Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial. It was great to learn a full workflow start to finish.

While I don't necessarily have to take the concept as far as Hartl did for it to work, I would suggest that the code relating to every concept/portion of the book is capable of doing something in and of itself, regardless of how small.

Actually the Hello Backbone.js tutorial is a good example of this. http://arturadib.com/hello-backbonejs/ Every page works on it's own and build on the code from the page before.