[plytheman]

Speaking as someone who isn't a programmer at all and needed (still needs, actually) to learn a language for dealing with a massive amount of data for a school project, I decided to have a stab at Python and have been working my way through his book. Overall I'd say it's pretty great. The good is that, as you mentioned, the early chapters (really the whole first half) are quick, repetitive exercises which I feel gave me a good understanding of the dirt basics of how Python works. Now I'm getting into the more tricky chapters and still really enjoying them.

I sometimes feel a bit more explanation from him on how or why certain things work would be nice, or maybe a few hints for where to start looking for answers in the extra credit would be good, but for the most part I think he's effectively covered enough of the basics needed to land me on the ground running. Between the exercises I've done so far and the basic script someone at reddit was kind enough to throw together for me I've managed to modify and make my own scripts to start processing the data for this project. Also it feels pretty awesome to write a script for an hour then actually see it work in less than a second and do what would have taken me days otherwise to do.

[AgentConundrum]

> I sometimes feel a bit more explanation from him on how or why certain things work would be nice, or maybe a few hints for where to start looking for answers in the extra credit would be good, but for the most part I think he's effectively covered enough of the basics needed to land me on the ground running.

There's the Python documentation[1], but coming from working mostly with PHP, I've had a hard time adjusting to them. PHPs documentation seems a lot more straightforward, so I've had to lean on StackOverflow[2] a lot more when I run into roadblocks (again, almost entirely as part of the "long list of things to research" exercise).

[1] http://docs.python.org

[2] http://stackoverflow.com