At 16:39 17/08/99 +0100, you wrote:

I am trying to learn Python and would like any input on books and tutorials to aid in learning.

The best Python book today is "Internet Programming With Python", both for beginners and advanced users. It starts with an excellent overview and proceeds to cover the hows and whys of the language very authoritatively. The authors are some of the foremost Python gurus, including Aaron Watters and Guido van Rossum, creator of Python. IMHO, "Programming Python" is too verbose and has too many bad jokes (bad jokes tend to be more distracting than good ones, for some reason). Because of its sheer volume, it must make a lot of people think that Python is much more complicated than Perl, since "Programming Perl" is about half its size. "Programming Python" beats IPWP in one area: Tkinter programming (a topic that is not relevant to Zopistas in general). "Learning Python" is short, but also tends to get lost in distracting details. It has one chapter that is very helpful for beginners: "Common Tasks is Python". That is one of the two sample chapters O'Reilly has in their web-site. Check it out at: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lpython/chapter/ch09.html The "Python Pocket Reference" is useful, although it lacks an index. The tutorial by Guido van Rossum available at http://www.python.org is also a good starting point. Python is easy to learn, consistent and readable, so one book should suffice, and reading lots of source code is the way to mastery. Best regards, Luciano Ramalho