This book is perfect for the beginner programmer. Whether you have prior experience or not, you will come away with useful information and valuable experience. I have read it through once, and am now going back through and working on the sample code you develop. I have never had so much fun, nor have I ever found a book that did a better job of being informative but not too much. He works you from Hello World to a simple but graphic game, teaching you Python, programming convention and how to apply what you have learned to several types of situations. I cannot say how much I love this book, or how great it has been to finally find an author who can get the job done. Five stars, only because that's the highest I can give!

This is a good first book on programming for a junior high school kid or a motivated elementary school kid.

If you are a programmer looking to learn the Python language, this book is not for you. It's not intended to be for you, and you will find it slow-paced and tedious. Instead, as its title says, it's for people who want to learn to program, and Python is the weapon of choice for this author. I'm a long-time professional software guy, and I bought this book as a possible tutorial for my kids. It is pretty amazingly good for that. The sample programs are realistic enough. They're also short enough that someone can type them in as they go along. The author takes the reader all the way from "no experience required" all the way through OOP. Each step is gentle and encouraging. Along the way, the author points out what is a requirement and what is just convention. Computer jargon is explained in comfortable terms for the beginner.

Service from Amazon dot com is excellent. The book was received in good order. The content of the book fulfilled my expectations. I had no direction in any programming language. This book is absolute for beginners and I have some kind of direction to plan and expand my programming knowledge with Python.

This is a pretty good book for learning basic python... and how to use the basic tools of Tkinter... and how to use a modified version of Livewires... The problem here is that you never learn how to access anything beyond the scope of basic self-contained programming and the highly limited capabilities of these pre-made modules. If you want to be able to interact with your hardware, the internet, or anything other than math and games, you're out of luck. Common sense would tell you not to start a beginning programmer with a reliance on one graphics module and one GUI module, neither of which you expect them to even take a peek at the source of, but then, common sense would require students not to expect to have graphics handed to them on a silver platter. The first nine chapters are good work though... The 10th and 11th simply give in to the students' wishes that they could go ahead and have a graphic interface without doing any of the work, and that's not good teaching.

I think there were some errors in this book. I do know it was rather distressing in a way.

The book is full of lessons, and I always wondered exactly where they were going with them.. what were they going to accomplish? Everything seems so unfinished in the book.

I recall a lot of emphasis on games... I don't care about games.

I have a Macintosh computer, and use Poser. I am distressed because some Poser-related utilities don't come in Macintosh versions. I thought I'd try to learn Python and write some of my own.

I gave up after less than 100 pages. I think these people are so caught up in their own knowledge that they forget to see things through the eyes of rank beginners who are desperate to learn programming.

This book joins a collection of other books that are truly disappointing.