python book for non technical absolute beginner

[Tom Morris]

On 2008-12-06, News123 <news123 at free.fr> wrote:
> One of my 'non technical' friends complained about knowing nothing at
> all about programming (though using computers regularly for mails / web
> browsing / googling and downloading / cropping photos )
>
> He wants to play a little with programming to stimulate parts of his
> otehrwise idle brain cells. ;-) Normally it's more the social science /
> linguistic parts being exercised,
>
> I thought python might be a nice language for this
>
> No my question does anybody know a nice beginners book (or a learning CD
> or on line tutorial)? Ideally it shouldn't be too serious and have a lot
> of small nice mini-examples
>

It's not Python, but I am a big fan of Chris Pine's 'Learn to Program'
<http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/>, which is a Ruby tutorial for absolute
beginners. It'd certainly be nice if the author were to allow someone to
port the tutorial for Python and other languages. It spends a lot of
time taking the reader from numbers and letters through conditionals,
loops, arrays, iteration and eventually to classes and objects. It
really is, in my opinion, one of the best programming tutorials for
beginners.

-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org>