Learning to program

[Jonathan]

Betancourt, Josef <Josef.Betancourt at GTECH.COM> wrote in message
news:7780536C9FD5D211801B0008C75D433933CFF1 at rimail03...
> The best book I've seen is "Code Complete" by Steve McConnell.  Its more
of
> a reference book and of course doesn't mention Python, but most of its
> contents are general enough to be useful in a Python context.
>

I'd agree that McConnel's book is very good, but it assumes rather a lot and
is very thick - it's really a book that teaches people how to program
better, rather than how to program. What's really needed is an equivalent of
Lalonde's Discovering Smalltalk - something not too long, that explains what
a program is, talks about the classic data structures etc.

Jonathan