I think that Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional is a great book for beginners. It's probably a bit too simplistic for someone who already understands the language or who has a decent background in development. I just borrowed it from my brother and while I consider myself a pretty good developer (I know PHP, Perl, Shell Scripting, VBScript, Visual Basic, and some C), I found that some of the things that other books presented where more advanced and that they left me missing some of the more basic concepts in Python (i.e. list comprehension made simple). After Beginning Python, a good book to go to would be Dive Into Python which you can get free at http://www.diveintopython.org. The book covers much of the same material that Beginning Python does, but has many more full fleged examples to help solidify what you are doing. I've also heard really good things about Learning Python, but these other two books seem to cover all of the same material.
After these, I plan on reading Game Programming with Python and the Python Cookbook to round out my library. I'll have to check out Python Essential Reference and I'll probably get Mastering Regular Expressions (which I think is a must have for any language even though it focuses on Perl). -- Jerry -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
