While the official Python Tutorial has served its purpose well, keeping it up to date is hardly anyones top priority, and there are others who passionately create really good Python tutorials on the web.
I think 'A Byte of Python' by Swaroop C H is a good beginners tutorial, and 'Dive Into Python' by Mark Pilgrim is a good tutorial for more experienced programmers. My radical idea is that we mirror these at diveinto.python.org and byteof.python.org, and simply remove the old tutorial from the Python 2.5 (or 2.6?) docs. Give these two good texts an official status as the Python tutorials. Just as we want to adopt best of breed packages for the standard library, I think we should use best of breed documentation, and I think there are less backward compatibility issues with tutorials than with libraries. :) I think this change would give us better docs as well as a smaller maintenance burden. If a day comes when Mark Pilgrim or Swaroop C H don't want to maintain these texts, I strongly suspect that there are other tutorials we can replace them with if noone else steps in to keep them up to date. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list