These look really useful when I've got more time on my hands, I'm going to read through them. 

Cheers

Excellent. I'm going to be all over this.

Fantastic, keep the informative links coming for this brave upcoming world of Python 3.x that Elemental will use!

Pygame is worth checking out.
It's basically a set of python modules based on SDL for making games easily.

The site has tons of examples and sample games to download. I think it's a nice way learn a new language, much nicer than the typical divx management app or whatever

Well, depending how intense any of us want to get there's always AI: A Modern Approach:

http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/

It's a huge overview, I only read the introduction and sections related to language processing 2 years ago,
but there is a good reason to get through it - a decent amount of example code in Python:

http://code.google.com/p/aima-python/

(There's also Java (http://code.google.com/p/aima-java/) and Lisp (http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/lisp/doc/overview.html))

As time permits I am excited to really get into the AI of Elemental. I would buy a book from Brad on strategic AI,
hell I've bought $100 useless textbooks so I wouldn't mind buying one that teaches me something.

Cool thread, thanks for the links people.

I would be interested to know whether any Stardockers use/have used Lisp, given that they are quite into their AI?

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/gameprog.html

Haven't had time to look at most of it but here are subjects covered:

• Shortest Paths
• AI
• Objects
• Scripting
• Tiles
• Hexagons
• Adventure
• Economics

at some point will probably organize everything on this thread. for now, here is a site for those who've never programmed anything and use windows:

http://pythonbook.coffeeghost.net/

With this site, you have to be carefull, the 'book' that is supplied on this site, uses Python 2.x while Elemental (As far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong...) is using Python 3.1. This might not sound as a problem, but one of the first programs supplied in the book (the typical 'Hello World') didn't work, I had to make changes on every line to get it working in Python 3.1

Can anyone who's gone through the learning curve recommend a good resource for object oriented Python? I understand the basics of programming (functions, operators, etc.) but am completely lost when it comes to classes.

Scorpiana, from what I can tell so far, the differences between Python 2.x and 3.1 aren't overwhelming. The main problems I've run into are the problem you've mentioned, the range() function, and input() versus raw_input(). 

Well, I've only tried that one example for now, and because of the results, I just thought to put a warning out. I didn't expect the language to have changed completly between those two versions (afterall, it's still the same language...) but it would suck pretty bad if you learned 2.6 and while modding you learned that everything you tried would generate errors...

So, better safe than sorry I guess

I learned about classes using HeadFirst Java. But for Python in particular not sure. You could try here or here but I honestly have not seen a really good explanation for OO using Python.

In other news, I am going through the free book on the Natural Language Toolkit , which happens to be in Python 2.* at the moment. There is a lot of fun stuff a person could use if they were trying to make AI for an RPG using the Elemental Engine though I suspect it would requiire NLTK to update to 3.0.

This page has some good OO slides, check out the Dec 3rd OO summary. It's for Java but the concepts should be understood regardless I hope.

I like Eric as an IDE for Python. Running sample programs through its debugger is probably one of the best ways to understand things - stuff like generators and list comprehensions are challenging at first glance if you are coming from Java.

The guy I brought up before has a set of slides on the basics of data structures. Again, code examples in Java but here the majority of slides deal with concepts and not code.