My first look at Python was an accident, and I didn't much like what I saw at the time. It was early 1997, and Mark Lutz's book Programming Python from O'Reilly & Associates had recently come out.
Home page for Python, an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented, extensible programming language. It provides an extraordinary combination of clarity and versatility, and is free and comprehensively ported.
Peter Norvig is a fantastic computer scientist and this is a great article concerning what it really takes to become truly adept in the use of some technology (e.g. a programming language).