Great Python books for the beginner

[bruno.desthuilliers at gmail.com]

On 12 jan, 21:04, Landon <projecteclip... at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

It wouldn't make any sens to port the K&R stuff to Python - different
languages, different uses, different problems... I mean, C is a low-
level language, mostly useful for low-level system programming, while
Python is a very high level language mostly useful for application
programming and Q&D scripting. So the applicative examples from K&R
are such no-brainers in Python they wouldn't teach you much, and the
more low-level examples (memory handling etc) just don't make sens in
Python because that's definitively not something you'd write in
Python.

But anyway: if you're looking for more real-life-like examples, Mark
Lutz's "Programming Python" might be worth a look.