Those prices are way to much IMO. But reading books & learning at home will not be enough to give you the skills to be a professional coder/programmer. You need to go to classes, conferences, seminars, etc and mix it up with other people to really learn by being in the environment. It's also harder to really learn something in such a short time frame.
You also need to have the mental chops as iknow said. I've talked to guys who were system/network engineers with certifications (MCSE, CompTIA A+, CCNA, etc) and they tried programming and just couldn't do it.
I say this because I've successfully done it. I graduated with a business degree and was working as a business analyst when I came up with an idea for a tech startup but needed to be technical so I took computer science/software development classes at UC Berkeley thru their Professional Courses program. I also went to several developer conferences and seminars. The classes were around $300-600 each and the conferences & seminars were around 1k-1200 each. I also bought a whole bunch of books.
From all this, I was able to get part time gigs at around $50 per hour. I had quit my day job to work on my startup and these pt gigs were supporting me. I'd say books gave me around 20% of what I needed to do these jobs. However, once you become good at it (programming theory such as general syntax, logic, constructs, data structures, patterns, etc), learning from a book becomes easier. I taught myself C# all from books. Bought 3 books on it, sat down for 3 days and that was it. No conferences, classes or seminars. Six months from reading those books I got a job making $115k.
From your link I clicked on another link to this:
Nashville Software School: 24 weeks programming boot camp
http://www.bootcamps.in/nashville/nashvi...re-school/
6 months for $1000 though there's a caveat:
“Our goal is to charge students no more than $1,000 out of pocket. The rest of our cost is reimbursed by our partner companies and is structured like a recruiter fee. We have had about 15 partner companies interview the graduates from November The students negotiate a salary for themselves and then those companies pay 20% of the first year’s salary back to the school. Really, it’s a reimbursement for the cost of training.”
The Nashville Software School is a non-profit but it is designed to be a self-sustaining program. Students are not obligated to work for a partner, though if they end up finding a job with a non-partner company, they are asked to pay back the basic cost of their training.
Ok, enough for now. I hope all that helped.
