I asked some questions last week about how those in the group learned Python, and I was given some suggestions. I ended up buying several books. Here are my brief opinions about them.
In case it seems that I am too positive about these books, please take into consideration that I purchased each of them after reading plenty of reviews, and several suggestions from other list members. This list is the cream of the crop.
In short, I would recommend that anyone keep all four next to the keyboard. If cost is an issue, I recommend getting them in the following order. "Dive Into Python" is available for free from diveintopython.org, but it is listed first because I think it is of the greatest immediate value.
Dive Into Python Python in a Nutshell Python Cookbook Learning Python
Shawn
Python Cookbook Very useful as a reference. There are examples for a great many things. Almost everything I've looked for is in this book. The only downside is that the samples are sometimes too advanced for me at my beginner level. I assume that this book is meant for readers with more that a couple of weeks' experience with Python, so I doubt that the problem is with the book.
Python in a Nutshell The best reference, because of the sheer volume of content. The only drawback is that, although all the options are there, clear explanations of how to make use of them are not provided, due to space considerations. This is not a negative comment -- once you have direction, you can pick up the rest elsewhere. However, I would not suggest using this as the sole reference.
Dive Into Python This book is awesome. I started reading this before the others arrived. I didn't get too far into it, because I jumped directly into a project for work using Python, so I'm limping along, mainly using all three O'Reilly books as references. But this book jumps right into useful code, and does a good job of explaining it. I should have completed this book before moving on.
Learning Python This book seems too basic to be used as the sole learning tool, unless the person is new to programming, not just Python. But the book does contain a lot of valuable information, and the depth of the explainations makes it a good companion to the others in my little reference set. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
