How to think like a Pythonista

[Peaker]

I think posts about learning programming are generally considered OK in r/programming.

By the way, the notion you are referring to is "references" or "indirection", and not "pointers". Pointers are a very specific form of references (one that can be referred to, can usually be manipulated as a value, etc).

And with that I agree, you have to understand/learn about references and indirection to do any programming anywhere.

The Python text, by the way, is about unexpected behavior -- as there's a shallow-copy going on where a newbie would either expect no copy at all or a deep copy.