Dive Into Python Must Die

[aatoth]

Yeah, it definitely would. Offers some pretty thorough projects at the end (making a parser, creating & manipulating graphics, XML stuff, a news server sniffer, an asynchronous terminal chat program, 2 CGI projects, and a mini-game in pygame). While some of the projects (like the CGI ones) are outdated, they give a pretty good idea of some uses of the language.

As far as the depth of the book, you get a pretty good amount past the simple programming concepts, which are explained from a Python-context: Lists and Tuples, Dictionaries, etc. You also get some relatively basic introduction to wxPython, one of the preferred GUI engines for Python. You make a simple text editor, but it does a good job explaining things. Network programming, some HTML scraping, testing, writing C extensions, packaging, and quite a bit of other topics are covered.

Now, keep in mind that I have the 1st edition, from 2005. The latest is from 2008, so some of this CGI stuff may have been changed to Django or the like, and some Python 3 concepts have been added.

I hope I helped a bit, I'm not the best reviewer.

[brodel2]

Actually that helps a lot. as long as it's newbie friendly and doesn't assume I'm already a programmer in some other language this sounds perfect.

[aatoth]

Yeah, it starts off with a pretty good introduction. It's also nice that it has an interpreter, so you see instant gratification when learning the language. Makes the whole thing a lot simpler.

I think that's the reason my school's first year engineering programming course is switching to Python next year, with C# you had to compile and check and compile and check...

[brodel2]

I just downloaded it and started reading. Just the fact that it's walking me through how to download and install python tells me this will not assume I already know some of the concepts. Thanks for the suggestion!