There's a lot of fusty programmers who take exception to books that claim they can teach you programming in a fixed period of time. These spoilsports think that titles like "Learn C++ in 21 Days" are a scam.

Of course these books don't teach you how to be a programmer in such a short time. They aren't supposed to. They put you on the path to becoming a programmer, and help you take your first steps. You could say that the books are designed to deliver the first step of Peter Norvig's Ten Year curriculum:

Get interested in programming, and do some because it is fun. Make sure that it keeps being enough fun so that you will be willing to put in ten years.

The point of these books is to get a beginner from thinking "this is scary" to "this is fun". They are designed to get you ready for Norvig's 2nd step:

Talk to other programmers; read other programs. This is more important than any book or training course.

A smartly paced, instructive and well designed tutorial gets you to the stage where you can have meaningful discussions with other programmers and you can start to look at code snippets and figure out what they mean. Does anybody seriously expect that they'll do more than that?

Link for the cartoon.