I think these books feed off the fact that most new programmers are doubly ignorant. They don't even know how much they don't know.

Speaking as someone who has had to maintain code written by someone who "learned" from these books, I completely agree. What was there was certainly C++ in a purely linguistic sense, but as code it was complete gibberish.

I am maintaining "code" written by person who was given this kind of book and told to build ERP. (This person don't have any previous knowledge on programming, mathematics or even computers)

10 years later it is worst than your nightmares.

I am quite fond of "Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours" (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H...). But I guess it is only the very brave who will use it to learn Haskell and Scheme.

Well, you can learn the syntax but the problem is when someone says they "know java" usually you care about them not just knowing java syntax, but the pitfalls, many frameworks that exist, general approach to problems, etc.

Just because I know Java + Ruby Syntax + Some stuff on RoR does not mean I am a good RoR programmer, there's just so much more to RoR than the syntax.

I want to see someone completely grok pointer logic in 24 hrs from knowing nothing.