I would definitely suggest checking out the documentation at http:// www.python.org/doc/. Also, you can check out the free book Dive into Python at http://www.diveintopython.org. It provides a great overview starting at the very beginning. I found it great and hope to buy it soon to support the author.
Python is considered a general-purpose language (so is Perl by the way.) It can handle anything from processing text, to running as an application server (check out http://www.zope.com.) You can also use pieces of it for web programming. In fact, if you've heard of Ruby on Rails, then you can see a similar Python project called TurboGears at http://www.turbogears.com. If you only need a web framework, then you can also check out Django (http://www.djangoproject.com) and many other projects designed for getting a web-based application up and running quickly. Not to leave you with the impression that it's really only suited for web stuff, there is also Pygame (http://www.pygame.com), a library and bindings to SDL so you can write your own games. I am currently learning Pygame with OpenGL and writing a simple clone of SpaceWars. I've also written a Jabber bot in Python for use where I used to work. You can use Python for systems automation as well. I wrote a small applet that opened SSH connections to every server in a list and then sent all the text you typed into a single box to all servers at the same time. I'm currently learning how to use Python with osascript to control applications in Mac OS X and have dabbled a little with the win32com stuff to have Python control some aspects of Windows. As you can see, it's an extremely versatile language and is really only limited by your imagination. There are some things that it doesn't do so well, but for the most part, those things have solutions. For example, Python is typically slower than other languages when you must iterate over something many times. For example, in game programming, to iterate over the entire list of objects in the world to update their positions or draw them. Many times things like this can be moved into C libraries to make then run faster. I myself haven't had many problems with this at all. In fact, none of my iteration code is in C for my game. Well, that's enough rambling for me. I've turned this post into a commercial for Python. I hope that I've left you with enough ideas to get started in the language. -- Jerry H -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list