Eight months ago I committed to learning "to code". At 31 the world has changed a lot since the days when I played around with BASIC in the early 90s.
There so much to learn. The most helpful book so far has been Lesley Anne Robertson's, Simple Program Design. It's a basic algorithm book utilising pseudocode. My greatest and most recent victory has been completing the first two Project Euler challenges. The first challenge there is basically the famous FizzBUzz test.
* Warning * If you hire me because I can FizzBuzz and conclude a fortiori that I can code then you're gonna have bad time :D
Hopefully it means that I do have the potential to code though..
It seems to me that a lot of the quick fixes out there aren't going to cut it on their own. Codecadamy is something I've used a little bit and it's a great learning tool for language specifics, but I don't feel like it taught be to think like a programmer. It doesn't break newcomers free from the old question, "what's the best language for a beginner". A slightly deeper understanding is required for that.