Rethinking the Python tutorial

[Magnus Lycka]

UrsusMaximus at gmail.com wrote:
> There are now more than 300 tutorials listed at
> www.awaretek.com/tutorials.html so one could even imagine a
> "mega-tutorial" using the best-of-breed tutorial for each sub-section,
> a la Turbogears ;-)))

We certainly don't need 300 tutorials. :) Pick the best in the
most relevant categories and promote them to official status.
In a way this is obviously like Turbo Gears... Pick the best
ones and package them together. I don't think we need a lot
of categories though. I think we should be conservative in
what we officially promote, and leave the pointers to various
special interests to the wiki. Perhaps one tutorial official
is enough? In that case it should be Swaroop's. That's the
core language tutorial. Mark's is more a series of visits to
the great land of Python applications, and

That's what I'm proposing. I looked at a few of the beginners
tutorials in the list above. Some are pretty old, others are
present a really bad introduction to Python, showing poor
coding style and a poor understanding of Python.

The current official tutorial isn't ideal for beginners without
previous programming experience, and providing a big bunch of
links for beginners to wade through (as in
http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide ) is far from ideal.
There are more than 40 links on that page for the beginners to
ponder over, and if they decide to follow the
BeginnersGuide/NonProgrammers link, they find another 20+ links.

These 60+ links are more or less equally prominent. There is
no "Go *HERE* first. If you have special interests, you might
want to look at something in this list of other resources as
well".

I'm pretty sure it hadn't looked like this if the official
tutorial had been good enough.

Somehow, the state of Python tutorials remind me of Python
web application toolkits...

I think that one good indication that a tutorial is good,
is that it's been translated to other languages. The ones
I know have been translated are Swaroop's, Mark Pilgrims,
Alan Gaulds, and Danny Yoo's Idle tutorial. Out of these,
Swaroop's and Pilgrim's are the "proper" Python Tutorials.
Danny's is an intro to Idle (which is a good thing) and
Alan's is really more focussed on programing in general
than on Python, although Python is the main vehicle.
(Just like How to Think Like a Computer Scientist.)