Great Python books for the beginner

[Landon]

One thing I wonder about is the examples these books use to teach the
concepts. I found myself really attached to K&R because the end of
section projects were utilities that I would find be able to find
useful in day to day work such as a version of wc and a program that
would take collapse all consecutive whitespace in a document into one
space. I could just use the projects from K&R, but I imagine a Python
book would have a better selection that highlight Python's abilities.

On another note, I would prefer to have a paper book so I don't have
to keep switching back and forth between documents on my computer.