Just wanted to add to the list of good resources for (teaching yourself) Python:
Learn Python the Hard Way and the Code Academy Python tutorial, both mentioned in the previous blog post, are both excellent (and free)–both are interactive (which I’ve found to be *hugely* helpful in writing code that actually runs (instead of spending ages rewriting the thing before realizing the problem is something mundane, like a missing colon)) and LPTHW is rote (i.e., typing out the prompt code verbatim) which, unlike pretty much any other examples of good pedagogy, I’m finding to be a pretty good way to learn this stuff.
Another very good resource (which is also the book assigned in my computational linguistics class) is John Zelle’s Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science, which can be accessed for free at http://www.maths.nuigalway.ie/~gettrick/teach/cs102/pythonbook.pdf as well as Zelle’s companion website, which has slides and downloadable code for all the program examples in the book: http://mcsp.wartburg.edu/zelle/python/.
There’s also learnpython.org, also with an interactive function (in addition to countless examples and explanations) and an MIT open courseware class, A Gentle Introduction to Programming Using Python: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-189-a-gentle-introduction-to-programming-using-python-january-iap-2011/, which I haven’t yet looked at but appealingly promises to be a “gentle, yet intense, introduction” to programming.