I had few months of GWBASIC experience from high school. Relative living in US mailed me Java the complete reference, i think the first editition with peter nau

I had few months of GWBASIC experience from high school. Relative living in US mailed me Java the complete reference, i think the first editition with peter naughton still as co-editor. It was not a dedicated effort but read the book several times for two years during free hours without computer (could not afford one). Finally after getting used pentium, the transition to real programming was easy and fast. I remember having aha! moment of oop after year and half but by the end of two years i had pretty much mastered the core java. I was driven by courisity, no pressure of completion and had all the time in the world. The book was thick with complete programs with outputs instead of snippets. Book also had list of all core packages, class and their members. It helped to grasp the core libs before hand. I would suggest a comphrensive book. I have not checked any Osborne reference series since then, but check if there are similar ones for python.