Python books

I’ve come across two online Python books recently that are just great. The first is a completely free online tutorial entitled A Byte of Python - The Perfect Anti-venom for your Programming Problems!. I think it’s better than Guido’s defacto tutorial, mostly because it uses more examples. There’s a nice range of topics covered, and I found myself referring to it a few times tonight as I was writing a little script to merge some CSV data into a MySQL database.

The second free online book that’s been loaded on my laptop’s hard drive for easy access is Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Python. I just love the Dive Into idea. Throw some decent code out there and step through how it works. For anybody who’s got even a moderate amount of programming experience, Dive Into Python should be one of the first books to check out. Within 30 minutes you’re introduced to a whole pile of really cool things you can do in Python. Great stuff.