learning python...

[Lloyd Sommerer]

About a month ago I was in about the same possition you describe
(programming experience, no python experience).  After looking at most of
the python books, I decided to go with _Python_Essential _Reference_.  It's
10 page introduction and 70 pages of more indepth material were just what I
needed to get a feel for python.  The rest of the book is about 200 pages
of material on various library modules.

The whole thing is well organized, and it was easy to vaguely recall where
some bit of information was when I needed to look something up.  You'll
also need the online documentation, and I found the way ActiveState
includes it in their python distribution to be quite helpful.

One final bit of advice:  When you're wondering how to use a specific
module, the best documentation is very often within the module itself.  I
didn't actually come across that advice anywhere, and it would have helped
me to have known it sooner.

Lloyd Sommerer

"Benjamin.Altman" wrote:

> Hello.  From the perspective of someone who already has programming
> experience, would anyone know if O'reillys "Learning Python" book would
> be better than say Prentice Hall's "Core Python Programming"?  Or would
> it be better to go straight into something like "Programming Python"?
>
> Thanks,
> Ben