I second Zed Shaw's book: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/
I'd pretty much first install Python 2.7. Then google how to install PIP ( so you can quickly install libraries you'll want for automation or whatever ). I'll assume that you want this to automate your marketing efforts, no?
Then install ..well..the typical libraries I use. ( via pip , from cmd )
pip install requests ( to make requests )
pip install selenium ( browser automation )
pip install mechanize ( old way to make requests but it's useful when filling forms )
pip install beautifulsoup4 ( for scraping )
Then, besides the basics, I'd tell anyone to try a practical example so they feel what python will be useful for. Typically some interaction with the web. So on Windows Start > IDLE ( basically run the python interactive interpreter )
Code:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
page_source = requests.get('http://google.com').content
soup = BeautifulSoup(page_source)
title = soup.title
print title
<title>Google</title>
print title.string
u'Google'
Or something like that. Basically I think one should do something practical right off the bat so you get hooked and learn with passion.
