Free e book written by John C. Lutsh available in HTML and PDF format, this book will not teach you to program. You will learn about how and why things work the way they do in Python on a basic level.

This is a well written starters guide, the PDF file is about 138 pages long. The writer is very novice friendly he, bothers to explain what precedence is for example. He does this in very a efficient and effective way, I personally liked how he explained assignments

I myself will not go through the entire book from beginning to end, but seeing how he explains basic things rather well, I will use this book as a reference guide. That is another beauty of this book, it is written so well you only can go through the for you  relevant chapters. Without worrying whether you should have read the chapters before it or not. He should add a search function on the HTML version of the book though

He has some small exercises in the book, with (thank God ) the answers.

The book is about Python 3, but since the writer is teaching you about concepts in Python,  you can use this book for Python 2 too.