Baby Stepping into Python

At Jose's suggestion, I'm looking at Python.

So far, I kind of hate it, and my stack of O'Reilly books with camels on them are shooting daggers at me every time I walk by them.

Nonetheless, if you're hellbent for diving headlong into Python, I have to warn you that two days of Googling for a good tutorial have turned up bubkis. I'm beginning to think there is no good way to learn Python, save to start looking at problems and then banging rocks together until you get something that resembles a solution.

Here's something that will be handy later:

>>> a = 'abcdefg'
>>> for i in a:
...   print "%u" % ord(i)
...
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
>>>