I think the general idea of the article - to find something you want to do and then use google to solve it, is a good one. If you force people to first read big books about coding guidelines before doing anything of interest TO THEM, most will just give up. Of course, one can disagree about the articles or sites suggested, but that's not the main point IMO.
"The Board approved a plan to dramatically increase the number of Internet domain name endings [..] from the current 22, which includes such familiar domains as .com, .org and .net"
Where do those 22 come from? doesn't each contry have its own TLD?
I started with Qbasic and did my first more ambitious projects in PHP. I agree that it is really easy to get started, but the horrible security holes I created are the downside;-)