Rethinking the Python tutorial

[Ed Singleton]

On 09/02/06, Magnus Lycka <lycka at carmen.se> wrote:
> While the official Python Tutorial has served its
> purpose well, keeping it up to date is hardly anyones
> top priority, and there are others who passionately
> create really good Python tutorials on the web.
>
> I think 'A Byte of Python' by Swaroop C H is a good
> beginners tutorial, and 'Dive Into Python' by Mark
> Pilgrim is a good tutorial for more experienced
> programmers.
>
> My radical idea is that we mirror these at
> diveinto.python.org and byteof.python.org, and
> simply remove the old tutorial from the Python
> 2.5 (or 2.6?) docs. Give these two good texts an
> official status as the Python tutorials.
>
> Just as we want to adopt best of breed packages
> for the standard library, I think we should use
> best of breed documentation, and I think there are
> less backward compatibility issues with tutorials
> than with libraries. :)
>
> I think this change would give us better docs as
> well as a smaller maintenance burden. If a day
> comes when Mark Pilgrim or Swaroop C H don't want
> to maintain these texts, I strongly suspect that
> there are other tutorials we can replace them with
> if noone else steps in to keep them up to date.

How about putting the current tutorial into the wiki and seeing if
people start updating it?  I'm not saying it would work, but it might
have interesting effects...

Ed