I feel like if Codecademy just made really awesome video tutorials for installing Python or Ruby, setting up rails or Django, using FTP, setting up MAMP, etc. then that would be sufficient to get people started after doing Codecademy.
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.