Many beginners do start at python.org. However, if you don't know anything about programming, and you don't know someone who can answer all the little questions

Many beginners do start at python.org. However, if you don't know anything about programming, and you don't know someone who can answer all the little questions that come up, it's really hard to learn from documentation alone. Even the official Python tutorial is fairly inaccessible to many people who are trying learn a language for the first time. Almost every Python author I've spoken with recognizes that no one resource works best for everyone. We each write to offer our particular take on a subject, and hope to find an audience that our perspective resonates with. I've never steered people away from documentation; in fact one of my goals is to steer people to the sections of documentation that they're ready to make sense of. One of my end goals is that people no longer need me as a teacher. That was my goal as a classroom teacher, and it's one of my goals as an author. The idea that there are no mistakes in official documentation is pretty unrealistic. Technical documentation has certainly improved over the last decade or so, but it will never be perfect. Most of us recognize that some areas of programming are better handled by third party libraries. In a similar way, there will always be room for learning resources that are maintained outside of official documentation sources.