The Quick Python Book Book

This book is best suited to someone with little formal education in computer science. The author often uses colloquial terms and longer expositions rather than formal & precise ones, probably in an attempt to make the book more accessible to programming amateurs. I won't fault that choice, except that it made the book considerably more verbose and less definitive than I'd have preferred. Frankly I've found no intro Python book that fills that bill, so again, so again, no demerits for Harms' book on this point.

As a result, I stopped reading at about the halfway point and switched to the free "Python 3.4 Tutorial" written by Guido von Rossum. At about 102 pages the PDF is considerably more terse than Harms' book, but Rossum's willing use of precise CS terms manages to introduce me (30 years in the business) to yet another programming language as quickly and efficiently as possible.