Great Python books for the beginner

[Ben Finney]

Landon <projecteclipsor at gmail.com> writes:

> I was wondering if anyone had any opinions on what other titles I
> could look into since this one seems from a glance at reviews to be
> teaching mainly through game programming (a topic I'm not too
> interested in) or if this one is a quality book by itself.

The book "Learning Python" is currently proving very useful to an
associate of mine. I'm watching his knowledge of Python grow
substantially every week, from what was an essentially zero start.

    Learning Python, 3rd Edition
    Mark Lutz
    O'Reilly
    <URL:http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596513986/>

Looking through the text, it is very well structured, thoroughly
teaching all the fundamentals of the language and types and idioms
while referring back to already-learned material. The author makes a
living training people in Python, and the third edition has benefited
from his many years of experience finding effective ways to teach the
language.

-- 
 \     "If you ever teach a yodeling class, probably the hardest thing |
  `\      is to keep the students from just trying to yodel right off. |
_o__)                      You see, we build to that."  -- Jack Handey |
Ben Finney