[wisty]

This isn't really correct. Zed Shaw (and maybe some others) started a backlash against it, because DITP 2 was so heavily recommended.

It does have a couple of weaknesses. Starting with ODBC is kind of lame, and should be updated to Sqlite. And SOAP needs to be taken out the back and shot, but that's just my opinion.

I'm sure Learn Python The Hard Way is pretty good, but DITP was the second place most Pythoneers were sent to (after the tutorial you pointed out, of course).

[MostAwesomeDude]

#python has been unrecommending DiP since before Zed wrote LPTHW. The #python dead-tree recommendation, for a long time, was How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: http://greenteapress.com/thinkpython/

Lutz' Learning Python dead-tree is also pretty great, from what I hear, although I haven't had a chance to sit down with a copy yet.