Python programming book

Can you recommend a Python programming book for a serious, professional 24-30 hour course for programmers?

I'd like to focus on advanced programming techniques and introduce them to functional programming, rather than teach them what's a while loop (that's assumed to be known) or just teach them syntax, functions and classes (I don't want a "translate Java into Python" course).

>>16
Let me know if you find a book that acknowledges that python is an order of magnitude slower than java or C#,
Not always, but it's expected from a much higher-level, completely dynamic, interpreted langauge. Can you create an anonymous closure which adds a property to a class and hacks an object into something else in Javur and C#?

and has less feature improvements than any other language on the planet in the past 10 years.
That's a cheap troll. If you really think that, I'm wasting your time reading your ignorance.

If you want something slow but elegant, try ruby instead.
Python's syntax is far more elegant than Ruby.