Wrestling with Python

Before I was put out to grass with the other dinosaurs, a colleague and I much enjoyed teaching an annual course entitled "Brute force programming for ecologists".
Of late I have felt the need to exercise my remaining little grey cells and decided to attempt  a spot of computer programming again. Sadly, Pascal, the language that I used previously has now largely disappeared and so I decided to learn Python. The little grey cells are very rusty indeed and it is a very uphill battle trying to master the Python monster. Thank goodness I bought the book "for the absolute beginner"! Modelling the Universe may take quite some time.