A Quick, Painless Tutorial on the Python Language (2008)

by Norman Matloff.

Languages like C and C++ allow a programmer to write code at a very detailed level which has good execution speed (especially in the case of C). But in most applications, execution speed is not important, and in many cases one would prefer to write at a higher level. For example, for text-manipulation applications, the basic unit in C/C++ is a character, while for languages like Perl and Python the basic units are lines of text and words within lines. One can work with lines and words in C/C++, but one must go to greater effort to accomplish the same thing. [via]

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/Python...