Newbie Question

[Alan Gauld]

On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 06:17:36 GMT, "John Smith"
<oldphartyankee at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Aside from the text online, what are the best books for a newbie learning 
> python as their first language? 

Well I'm biased but I think my book "Learning to Program Using
Python" is pretty good for the complete beginner :-)

Others include "Teach Yourself Python in 24 hours" and
the "Visual Python"(?) book gets good crits too - but I haven't
read that one. 

"Python, How to Program" by the Dietels tries to start at the
beginner level but I suspect it dives too deep too quickly for
many, and it is quite expensive.

Most other books are aimed at those with at least one other
language behind them so don't explain all the jargon and concepts
as much as those above.

However despite being bad for my royalties I'd actually recommend
trying the various beginners online tutorials first and then
buying one of the more mainstream books (Learning Python, Quick
Python etc) as a long term better value investment. You will use
those books for a longer period than the complete beginners
guides I suspect.

Alan G.
Author of the Learn to Program website
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld/tutor2