Zed Shaw’s written a book… about learning programming, but using Python specifically. http://learnpythonthehardway.org/index
Book is for sale but also available FREE online either way.
Thinking in Python, Bruce Eckel is often considered a good book, and it is a free download. http://www.mindview.net/Books/TIPython. It isn’t a begginers book though, but after reading some of the pre-mentioned resources above, this may be a good book to tackle.
I don’t have to much experience with Python, but it is looking more attractive day-by-day. One thing though I don’t like about it is it’s documentation: but I have been spoilt by the PHP manual in the past.
I noticed someone mentioned wxPython further up in this thread, as far as GUI programming goes I would suggest using PyQt, which is the Qt widget library made by Trolltech wrapped to Python.
PyQt is identical to Qt, which means you can read the documentation supplied by trolltech in order to solve your problems. It also enables you to use such tools as Designer for laying out your GUI.
I’ve been playing with the Django framework for a couple of days and it looks good, although it contains some bugs and currently the ORM only supports postgreesql, mysql and sqlite. But support is on it’s way for other databases (they currently work on Oracle support).
Though it cannot be used for production yet (it’s been in production for 2 years but it’s been released as open source in July, so it can be considered as new), it looks very good and if you are open-source fans maybe you can give them a hand and test it:
How to think like a computer scientist - A great introduction into Python. Not a ‘tutorial’ oriented approach, but a more problem solving approach, which is fantastic.
Off Topic:
Project Euler - Although not Python specific, it has helped me learn a lot about the language. Its also fun to solve =)
Here are some additional Python and Python-related resources for anyone learning Python.
PEP-8: Style Guide for Python Code The Django Book: Book about developing using the Django framework Django Snippets: Helpful bits of Django code Pylons: Another popular web-development framework
You should also check out virtualenv, a Python library that allows you to create isolated Python environments. This library helps to avoid messy site-packages directories and managing package dependencies.
PyJamas: A development platform/framework with a Python->Javascript compiler, so you can write client-based applications in Python instead of Javascript; desktop apps as well.