What you say is true. However, I didn't think the target audience of this book was newbies. Python newbies yes, but not programming newbies. For programming newbies I would recommend the "Learning Python" book instead. The availability argument, however, is a good point.
I was/am a python newbie beginning to learn python with this excellent book.
I think it would have been much easier if there were more comparisions of features to other mainstream languages which one likely already knows (C, VB, Java ...)
I liked the following Java book especially because of those comparisions:
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/0130894680/qid=1104474997/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/302-1345611-4845666
The included comparisions helped me to get into the Java language more quickly.
-- Greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
