newbie : books on python

[Alex Martelli]

Mahboob Hussain writes:

> I program in C/C++/Java/Perl and want to learn Python. Could you suggest
> a few good books / sites to get me started ?
> 
www.python.org is the site from which everything starts -- once you've
exhausted the site itself and the links it gives, you're Tim or Guido:-).

My personal recommendation about books (speaking as a newbie
busy catching up on his reading:-) is to go for the dated but
excellent "Internet programming with Python" -- don't get fooled by
the misleading title, it's really about Python, the internet comes into
it just about as a source of interesting examples.  I also liked
O'Reilly's new "Learning Python".  "Programming with Python",
OTOH, I'd give a miss, if I were you -- I found it chaotic to the
point that it turned me off Python for a while, and when I mentioned
the fact recently on this list/newsgroup, most respondents seemed
to agree with this evaluation.


Alex