I've been programming Ruby pretty extensively for the past four years or so, and I'm extremely comfortable with the language. For no particular reason, I've decided to learn some Python this week. Is there a specific book, tutorial, or reference that would be well-suited to someone coming from a nearly-identical language, or should I just "Dive into Python"?
Thanks!
A safe bet is to just dive into python (skim through some tutorials that explain the syntax), and then get coding. The best way to learn any new language is to write code, lots of it. Your experience in Ruby will make it easy to pick up python's dynamic concepts (which might be harder to get used to for say a Java programmer).
Try a python tutorial or book on learning python.
I started learning from the python tutorial. It is well written and easy to follow. Then I started to solve problems in python challenge. It was a really fun way to start :)
I suggest just diving into Python, it's similar to Ruby so you should have no problems:
After running through some tutorials on-line (the ones posted so far look pretty good), find a current Ruby project you've done (or are working on) and re-write it in Python. I've used this technique to transition from various languages, and it's helped enormously.