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Trust me jpetrie, as a person who primarily uses a majority of free software,
Who are you, why should I trust you, and what does using free software have to do with any of it?
Learning is not purely a science. Every person learns differently -- there are different ways in which every given person will most effectively be able to internalize information. What works and has worked for you may be completely ineffective for somebody else. For example, you seem to feel the 3DBuzz material has been helpful to you, but it's very heavily video-based (at least from what I can see without paying for it), which is completely ineffective for me (as an aside, their freely available C++ material contains some errors -- relatively harmless ones, but still).
Encouraging somebody to go out and spend money on something that for all you know might be completely useless to them is not helpful. Encouraging them to spend money at all, right off the bat like this, is not helpful. Hundreds of users on this forum go out and buy (for example) the first book on C++ they see, and then discover later that C++ isn't the language they wanted to learn or that they didn't want to learn programming in general because it was nothing like what they thought. We would prefer to prevent that sort of thing from happening.
There's certainly nothing wrong with recommending commercial resources that have worked for you or others, but do remember that you're posting in a forum frequented by impressionable neophytes and it's often better to let them get their feet wet with something free of financial commitment until they can discover that they are interested in investing money into their education. Waiting a month or two to buy some online video course will not ruin them forever as a programmer.
