Thanks for the advice and links! I always appreciate when a stranger takes time to help me.
I'm going to check out the Felleisen stuff, but my concern is that it's so much more academic than anything I'll have time to do. The difference between what I'm doing and a college class is that I don't have time to lay groundwork. I can't explain how much of the underlying systems work, even though I think it's really important.
That might seem like I'm taking issue with the concept of a boot camp, but it's actually the opposite. I want to prove, at least to myself, that a boot camp can be truly valuable and provide long-term education value. That means teaching modeling, good habits, and good practices more than teaching how the stack works.
> pretending that web programming is a snowflake looks a bit like an excuse
I don't think I made my point clearly. Beginning web programming (at least in Ruby, Python, PHP, and Node) doesn't require an understanding of many underlying concepts that you'd need to know to write in, say, C. By the time you need to know how the compiler optimizes things, how memory is allocated, or when to fork vs. spawn, you're probably beyond the scope of a boot camp (and hopefully dealing with lots of traffic!)
The core of the problem isn't that I'd be teaching web programming. It's that I have very limited time, and while not much of the concepts are complex, there's too much to cover in even a year of classes.
> dismissive attitude
> hopping on the boot camp gravy train
> matter of taste
Since I do appreciate your advice, I'll give you some.
You seem to enjoy helping people on HN, just like I do. That's what motivates me to teach: I love helping people, especially to do something I think they'll enjoy (and can make them more financially stable).
On HN especially, I often perceive two motivations for helping: to genuinely share knowledge and experience, or to feel superior. Sometimes these are intermixed a bit, of course.
If your goal is truly to share your knowledge and experience, then you shouldn't taint it with the implied judgments, presumptions, and condescension that I've highlighted above. If your goal is, instead, to feel superior, then I hope this is fulfilling you in whatever way you're not intrinsically fulfilled.
And, on a related note, I'm not going to study anything Zed Shaw says about anything because his online persona is repugnant. It may be my own bias, but I don't trust the suggestions of a teacher who acts like a spiteful child on the internet and takes pleasure in verbally attacking others. I've never heard of a great teacher who behaved that way -- in fact, my great teachers have all been incredibly patient, kind, and magnanimous.