Ahh, thanks so much for grabbing a cached PDF! I wasn't expecting to make the front page of HN and yes, my server went down. Great lesson in scalability!
That's how I started with python. Even year after that I sometimes went to that site for reference for some specific things I knew I'd find there. If someone knows how to program this is the resource I recommend for starting with python. It's easy, it's short, it's entertaining (some of the tasks) and it gives pretty nice overview.
These videos were my first "Aha!" with programming, I loved them!
I've shared it with many who were starting to program and they have proved to be very helpful in understanding, not only python but some of the basics of programming and what can be done with it.
Awesome for switching between languages, but not so good for absolute beginners. I forwarded this to a PhD biologist friend who wants to learn the basics of programming (to possibly apply to the bioinformatics field), and she said "...what?!"
You won't miss much if you skip the article entirely. That said, the material it links to seems pretty good. I've been trying to learn Python lately and working through the interpreter at first seems to be a good way to get a sense of how Python does things. And there are some neat libraries out there. For example, you're not much more than a "from pygr import worldbase" away from wandering through the human (or mouse, or yeast...) genome if you want to. That said, I still need to set up a proper vim config for Python.
I've been wondering this and haven't been sure who to ask. Would you say CodingBat would be a good way to learn Python from scratch? Like, instead of lessons, just go through their examples and learn from their solutions? Or is it purely a "test what you know" thing?
Site seems to be down (PDF posted above) but the link to the lessons is a good link to keep handy.
Link to class: http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/int... Link to video 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKTZoB2Vjuk