I've had some previous exposure to python, but nothing mission critical. I just switched from php to python about 3 weeks ago in order to deploy apps on the Google App Engine. My deepest language experience is in frontend Actionscript 3, so Python feels very similar to that in that you have imports, packages, and modules. I do still find myself typing ";" on rare occasions to end lines.

Here are a few things that I got tripped up by:

- I was searching for a substr? function. there is none; instead you do things like str[0:1]

- Dont Count on autocompletion (at least not in eclipse). I was hoping I could duck type things like i had done in php Eclipse and get object info autocompleted. This is not possible, so you have to keep a lot more info about objects in your head. Perhaps one way around this is to try keep all your classes in one module.

- Test with IDLE. I was used to testing php code by whipping up a single page and browsing to localhost. With appengine, and possibly your web server, this isn't justifiable when Python ships with a pretty cool cmd IDE.

hth!