On Fri, 04 Mar 2011 11:54:41 -0600, Ignoramus20691 wrote:
By the way, I bought a book for my 9 year old son to teach him
programming. It is called "Hello World!" and it uses Python.

So far, he seems to like it.

So, I need to learn Python too, any suggestions for a good Python book
for programmers. Something that would not explain in depth what is an if
statement, just would explain how to use one.

I haven't kept up with current books about Python (a long time ago
I bought a CORBA-via-Python book, which turned out not useful, and
an overly elementary Python book) and have used online refs since
to deal with particular questions. However, I've seen both of the
following books recommended in comp.lang.python : "Python Standard
Library", Fredrik Lundh, http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596000967
and "Python Cookbook, Second Edition", Martelli/Ravenscroft/Ascher,
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596007973/index.html. Both are
a few years old now and I don't know if newer versions are out.

My thought is that it isn't worthwhile to get a book about Python
syntax, which can be presented well enough online. However, the
Standard Library book should be able to present background and
framework information that online man pages often lack, while
the Cookbook presents numerous segments of code for specific
purposes, which may be useful examples for learning Python.
The tables of contents of both books are available at those
O'Reilly links, so you may be able to see if one or the other
matches up with what you want.

Also the books "Dive Into Python" and "How To Think Like A
Computer Scientist" are online somewhere, and mailing list
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor may help.

On 2011-03-04, James Waldby wrote:
[...]
Perl is a good choice in many ways, far better than almost any Redmond
product, but for a non-programmer trying to get things done, Python
probably is a better choice. The language is far better organized than
most. Online documentation and support is good. Eg,
http://docs.python.org/library/ and sibling pages are nicely done.
[...]
Python has packages one can use in a program via 'import' statement;
see http://pypi.python.org/pypi. But the only really obvious
economics related stuff seems to be
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/econ/0.4.

--
jiw