I agree with this entirely, and I fully understand that web development represents a tiny slice of coding generally and that what I've presented is a tiny fraction of what you need to learn to be a good web developer.
I plan to edit the post a little to reflect what people have said. Hope the title wasn't too misleading.
Yeah, you're definitely right. I chose to include "coding" over "web development" in the title only for concision/aesthetic purposes. Thanks for clearing this up for other people. Hope it wasn't too misleading.
If you (1) love programming, (2) want to become a much better programmer (e.g. want to really understand how things work), and (3) want to surround yourself with smart, hyper-curious, and extremely positive/encouraging people, then you should definitely do HS, even if it means taking time out of college or grad school.
I'm a batch[1] alumnus and law-school student who, prior to Hacker School, had been programming for only about a month. I did Hacker School concurrently with law school, but my attention split between the two was about 99:1. Before I started HS, I knew only the very basics -- the stuff you might find in the first 3-4 chapters of your standard introductory Python book. Once I started Hacker School, my knowledge absorption rate shot up at least five fold. This is because it is hard to overestimate the value of:
(1) working next to people like Dave/Nick (HS co-founders), who will not just answer your programming question -- but spend the next 3 hours of their time happily explaining to you the intricacies of 15 other topics related to your question, all the while infecting you with their enthusiasm for those topics;
(2) having the structure that Hacker school provides -- the morning check-ins, the spontaneous white-board-assisted discussions, the Saturday presentations -- to help you tackle those projects you've always wanted to start/complete;
(3) simply being in the physical proximity of people who love programming, people who will show you how much you still have left to learn, and make you excited about learning it.
I'm now leaving law school to work at a software development company in San Francisco, which is a development that I certainly did not think was possible after just 3.5 months of serious coding. So yeah, HS can make you employable too, and probably much faster than you expect. But as Nick/Dave say (http://www.hackerschool.com/about) getting a job certainly shouldn't be your only reason for joining.
