Of course, I meant the "tinkering, playing with, etc." meaning. That would be quite strange to look for an advice "how to break the Pentagon's systems" in public forum :) And while I plan to tell them about the "practical programming" (ie, typical tasks what they would be doing when hired), I think the school is still that wonderful time when can afford to do something just for the fun of it. Who knows what will come out of it, when they know how to join several programs together via clever scripting, build some circuit board to handle some household appliances, and set up a webcam for the world to control that. I see them as potential geniuses rather than potential data entry operators with programmer skills.
I think Python is a very important language to learn - both easy and advanced, with very wide support in different platforms, with loads of great applications that can be scripted by it, and great community support. I am aware, of course, that the web is full with tutorials, etc. It's the sheer abundance of material what made me post the question, an attempt to narrow the scope down. The book Dive into Python seems like good solution, I think I'll give it a shot. Passiday -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
