Also, Python has been evolving at a somewhat faster pace these past few years, so make sure that you’re aware of whether a newer edition of a book exists or is in the works, and of the version of Python covered by any particular book (including the ones I recommended), you may also want to at least scan through the ‘what’s new in python’ sections of the online docs for subsequent versions.

Feel free to cherry pick when reading, though. Backward incompatibility between versions is pretty rare.

I need a good reference book for sure… I spent about fifteen minutes today puzzling over the use of triple double quotes (”"”) for a multi-line string. I thought “”" was only for comments so was confused to see a constant string defined with that.

Depending on your specific needs and learning style, you may find some of the following useful: ‘Learning Python’, ‘Programming Python’, ‘Python Programming on Win32′ (all from O’Reilly), ‘Dive Into Python’ from Apress, ‘Core Python Programming’ from Prentice Hall, ‘Text Processing in Python’ from Addison-Wesley, or ‘Python Web Programming’ from New Riders.

Because people differ so much in their preferences regarding books, I do *not* recommend getting any books without at least perusing them to see if they work for you.

I’ve started using Python and it’s such a pleasure–I don’t get why people have a problem with the syntactic whitespace. The code is clean and easy to understand. I indent my code anyway, so brackets seem unnecessary.

I think my feeling about more male vs. less male programming languages probably comes down to the simple matter of who I came into contact with when I used various languages, not anything to do with the languages themselves.

I did see a Python book at the bookstore that was co-written by a woman… that was heartening.

By the way, is there a particular Python reference you like? I’m working through online tutorials but want something more comprehensive for when I’m doing my own project.

For now I’m not ready to network with other Python programmers but I may be at some point. I have a fairly large project in mind that I might want to expand beyond my own efforts at some point in the future.

I’m glad you were hanging around on burningbird to help me get beyond my initial reaction to Python. Thanks for continuing the conversation.

I’d still like to know which languages you consider ‘less male’, assuming this isn’t simply synonymous with ‘more proprietary’.

Also, let me know if you would like to be referred to other women who use Python.