I really don't think you should advise someone to read "_why's poignant guide to ruby" as an introductory text. The sillyness is very distracting, the humor doesn't suit everyone, it's not very well structured and the information density is quite low. I feel there's a ready chance it will be demotivating. I definitely didn't consider it a decent introduction to Ruby or programming. </heresy>
There needs to be more content geared to people who know nothing about programming. Those people have the highest hurdles to jump, as they don't even know what they don't know.
I started a little blog about trying to learn to code from scratch: <a href="http://newbiehacker.wordpress.com/" rel="nofollow">http://newbiehacker.wordpress.com/</a> As that blog post says, it is really difficult finding resources for people who want to learn but really have <i>no</i> programming background whatsoever.
As someone who's never really been able to break into coding my biggest problem with most of the learning material is it does not tackle a broader perspective on problem solving. Learning syntax and libraries is easy. Knowing where to apply them and how to architect your program is the really hard part. I'm not sure how you learn that other than experience and for a novice that means countless hours of work before they can produce anything unique and useful.
Usually "I stopped reading after..." is used as a metaphor, and the article still gets read.<p>In this case though, I really did stop reading after "as a matter of fact, any self-respecting programmer you’ve ever met is mostly self-taught."