As controversial as Zed Shaw may be, he wrote a great weirdly-shaped programming book. Buy it at learnpythonthehardway.org

If you want to learn how to program or if you want the Python equivalent of “Javascript: The Good Parts,” it’s for you.

But what’s so special about it?

1. Cover design is by (one of our own Charlotteans - a word interestingly close to charlatan).

2. It’s short (150 pages).

3. Each chapter is an exercise. Turns out you don’t learn programming by reading about it. Lord knows I’ve tried.

4. It’s opinionated. It’s clear that you should use pip, distribute, nose, and virtualenv. These have become de facto tools.

5. Page 1 is a blank page, and I love when authors leave room for me to take notes.

6. It’s changing the way people teach code-related things:

I received an email today from the organizers of PyCon (The Python Conference you should go to here) which reminded me that Daniel Greenfeld’s tutorial on Pinax has changed:

“Heavily inspired by Zed Shaw’s Learn Python the Hard Way, I’m changing the lecture style format of the Pinax Solutions Tutorial at Pycon 2011 to a more workshop oriented format.”