"Python Annotated Archives" A good book?

[Kendall Clark]

    >> Greetings,
    >> As a newbie pythonista, I saw this book and was wondering what
    >> others thought, as far as technical quality, target audience
    >> suitabilty, and readability.

With all due respect to the book's author, I disliked it so much I
sent it back the day after it arrived from Amazon. I'm a book junkie
and buy everything on Python, but this is the only one that just
seemed terribly unhelpful. Maybe that's because most of it seemed more 
basic than my Python skill level presently, but it simply didn't seem
worth keeping for as much as it costs.

For beginner's, I think Learning Python is excellent, as well as the
Quick Python book. I have a huge shelf of computer books, many of
which are aimed at teaching programming, since I'm an autodidact in
this area. I think both Learning Python and the Quick Python book are
among the very best 'new to programming' books I've read. I've given
people, who I wanted to teach to program, copies of Learning Python
several times already, and some of them are progressing nicely. As
much as I enjoyed it, I've never done that either for The Little
Schemer or Simply Scheme.

Python hits the *perfect* balance of 'easy to learn' (because clean,
elegant, and just the right kind and amount of syntactic sugar) and
'useful for practical tasks'. Smalltalk also comes very close,
particularly the, imo, excellent Squeak. REBOL may also develop into a
contender, though, I suspect, not any time soon.

Just another datapoint.

Best,
Kendall Clark