[Tutor] Welcome

[David Ascher]

Welcome all --

I'm pleased -- the list has been created about two days ago, and it has
over two dozen subscribers.  I know many of the email addresses of the
subscribers, which means that there are at least a few 'old-timers'
around, and there are also others which are new to me, which is great --
hopefully some of you are novices who will feel free to ask questions, for
the others to answer.

Let me start by introducing myself -- my name is David Ascher, and I've
been programming in Python for about four or five years.  While I've just
co-authored a book called "Learning Python" with Mark Lutz, it's not a
book which was designed to teach programming.  I've been programming for
more than half my life, and I haven't taught programming in ages, so I
feel I'm a bit out of touch with what students new to programming need to
know, and what parts are hard to learn or unintuitive. I'm hoping that
with a little interaction between the students and the teachers on this
list, two goals can be reached -- 1) the folks who are trying to learn
programming with Python get the help they need, and 2) the folks who want
to develop better documentation for learning programming with Python get a
test audience to help them work out the pedagogics.

Well, I'll clear the stage and let the questions roll in.  

Cheers,

--david