I used Codecademy for the first seven weeks. I started learning to program in January 2012, so the timing was perfect - I was their target market.

It was fun and interesting for a while. But the instructions began to get cumbersome. You had to read 3-4 paragraphs just to learn that they wanted you to write a simple, one line loop.

I spent more time reading instructions than thinking about or writing code.

I was using K & R at the same time, and the contrast was instructive. In K & R you're given a concise description of a feature, and then a short exercise that forces you to think about how to use it.

In the final few weeks, my only motivation to keep going with Codecademy was the thought that "at least I'll have these badges that show what I know". That was a pretty big warning sign.

I stopped when I realized I wasn't even learning the concepts in the lessons. There simply wasn't enough coding practice for them to stick.

I haven't been there for a few weeks, so perhaps things have gotten better. But from what I saw, they needed to work on cutting out the cruft in their instructions. Pedagogy is difficult.