Rethinking the Python tutorial

[Magnus Lycka]

While the official Python Tutorial has served its
purpose well, keeping it up to date is hardly anyones
top priority, and there are others who passionately
create really good Python tutorials on the web.

I think 'A Byte of Python' by Swaroop C H is a good
beginners tutorial, and 'Dive Into Python' by Mark
Pilgrim is a good tutorial for more experienced
programmers.

My radical idea is that we mirror these at
diveinto.python.org and byteof.python.org, and
simply remove the old tutorial from the Python
2.5 (or 2.6?) docs. Give these two good texts an
official status as the Python tutorials.

Just as we want to adopt best of breed packages
for the standard library, I think we should use
best of breed documentation, and I think there are
less backward compatibility issues with tutorials
than with libraries. :)

I think this change would give us better docs as
well as a smaller maintenance burden. If a day
comes when Mark Pilgrim or Swaroop C H don't want
to maintain these texts, I strongly suspect that
there are other tutorials we can replace them with
if noone else steps in to keep them up to date.