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Yep, this is exactly right, although I'd say it almost totally teaches programming. The book definitely teaches computational thinking and gets people over that hump and into finally learning programming, but I need to work on a follow-up book that has a lot of projects for people to tackle on their own. That's really where they finally learn to code as an independent programmer.

I used to find Dive into Python a good resource when I was moving from Perl to Python.

I used The Quick Python Book when making the same transition years ago and thought it did a good job.

Also look at http://learnxinyminutes.com if you are already a programmer.

But here's the thing: LPTHW isn't meant for "experienced programmers", it's for raw beginners who have never written a single line of code before. Zed explains this over and over again in the intro to the book.

Ok, thanks!

But then it will be confusing, people will assume that scripting is the same thing as programming.

Probably because scripting is programming.

In what way does LPtHW not teach programming in your mind?