It walks you through the thought process of various things you do when you write code and makes you actually write it, which is awesome. But that's where it ends so you've got to take the leap from there and actually BUILD something.
I do ALWAYS recommend starting to Codecademy just to see if programming itself gets you off and to get your feet wet. Even now I still use it for that.
Incidentally, I still don't know how to use Ruby or Python functionally, so that's a pretty big failing of my learning so far. Like, I can write Python and Ruby scripts way better than Php, but Php is always installed and configured on every server and I know exactly how to use it in my dev environment, so I always default to that.
I'm making a Twitter App right now, and for speed I'm using a PHP API wrapper that is way worse than just writing the requests in Ruby. But. I don't know how to actually USE Ruby.
That felt good to say out loud, er, on the Internet.
However, LPTHW wouldn't have made sense to him if he hadn't already done CA, so he liked having done them both.
If I knew nothing about programming then I would find the basics of coding that Codecademy teaches to be useful as it is a different way of problem solving that needs to be learned.