I disagree with Zed Shaw here. Ignoring the ODBC problem, Dive into Python is written well for its target audience. This book is written for people who already know how to program. Seeing a function with a doctstring, list comprehensions, etc all at once is exactly the way I wanted to get a feel for what python was about. It served its purpose very well. Now I will admit, some of the examples did get tedious to the point where I skimmed them. But overall the book served its purpose well.