[Tutor] What books do you recommend?

[Tim Goddard]

I just finished Michael Dawson's Python Programming for the absolute
beginner.  I thought it was pretty good, with only a few minor nit
picks.  My programming background was limited to MATLAB and some
Visual Basic scripting for excel, access etc making me the target
audience.  I liked the examples, and by the end has you put together a
simple asteroid-style game (with livewires and pygame).  If my C class
back in undergrad had promised I'd be making some shooting games in
the end perhaps I'd have kept with it and gone into computer science
or something.

I also encountered a previous posters problem with the pizza not
falling down.  If you use the latest version of livewires the Sprite
class does not accept velocity arguments and you have to invoke a
separate Mover class to make it move.  Considering I had no experience
with python before this book, that I was able to open the games module
and determine what changed says a lot about what can be learned from a
'beginners' book.