Book Recommendation

[Michael Geary]

> Well I know C, bash and i work with scripting alot i know the basics of
> programming, incremental development, debugging, etc I wanna implement
> gentoo's portage system which is completely written in python. I
> wanna become a gentoo developer which requires me to learn bash and python
> gentoo's ebuilds are written and portage in python. That means i have to
> be a top notch python programmer I've read the first four chapters of the
> book which is very good it doesn't play around it gets straight to the
> point, but as i said the size, and weight of the book is intimidating. MY
> mom bought me this book so i dont wanna just leave it here collecting dust
> i might just have to pick it up and read it :)

Have you gone through the tutorial at www.python.org?

http://www.python.org/doc/2.3.2/tut/tut.html

When I started learning Python, I made the mistake of skipping the tutorial,
figuring that I didn't want an introduction to programming (having been
programming for over 30 years). I didn't realize that this tutorial was also
very good for programmers with experience in other languages.

My favorite Python books at the moment are Alex Martelli's _Python in a
Nutshell_, David Mertz's _Text Processing in Python_, and David Beazley's
_Python Essential Reference_.

-Mike