Books recommendation

[Octavian Rasnita]

Hello,

Do you have, or can I find elsewhere a recommendation for books,tutorials and sites appropriate for beginners?

I have a lot of experience in Perl but I am interested to also learn Python for:
- web development (with frameworks similar with Catalyst and Ruby on Rails, good templating systems, good ORMS and form processors)
- Desktop apps with WxPython
- Create MS Windows apps, executables, dlls, ActiveX, OS interaction...
- Text parsing, regular expressions...

I am also interested to find where I can get Python modules from and how... similar tools and sites with cpan and ppm for Perl.

Thank you.

Octavian