Newbie needs references

[Simon Willison]

billludden wrote:
> Hi<
> 
> I have not programmed since 1975, and that was in BASIC.
> I'd like to learn Python, but everything I find on the web is
>     way above my head.
> Does anyone have books or tutorials they would recommend
>     for an illiterate to teach himself Python?
> 
> Thank you,  Bill

I'm a Python newbie as well and while I found some useful resources on 
the web (the tutorial on www.python.org and the Python 101 on 
www.devshed.com were both very useful) by far the best resource I've 
found so far is the O'Reilly book "Learning Python". It covers the core 
of the language thoroughly but in an easy to understand way and is 
probably the clearest "learning" programming book I've read, although a 
lot of that could be credited to the elegant design of Python itself.