Learning Python by Mark Lutz will be the most perfect book to get you started! Perhaps there are others aimed at the non-programmer but after getting through that book (2 times) I finally left it with wings... It is a great book for the n00b in my humble opinion. After that, you'll pretty much start flying higher on your own as long as you always keep the python docs handy along with the addresses to comp.lang.python and it's IRC channel #python on irc.freenode.net...
Good luck, welcome to Python! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
