Q:

Beginner looking for beautiful and instructional Python code

As a complete beginner with no programming experience, I am trying to find beautiful Python code to study and play with.  Please answer by pointing to a website, a book or some software project. 
I have the following criterias:

complete code listings (working, hackable code)
beautiful code (highly readable, simple but effective)
instructional for the beginner (yes, hand-holding is needed)

I've tried learning how to program for too long now, never gotten to the point where the rubber hits the road.  My main agenda is best spelled out by Nat Friedman's "How to become a hacker".  
I'm aware of O'Reilly's "Beautiful Code", but think of it as too advanced and confusing for a beginner. 

A:

Buy Programming Collective Intelligence.  Great book of interesting AI algorithms based on mining data and all of the examples are in very easy to read Python. 
The other great book is Text Processing in Python

A:

Read the Python libraries themselves.   They're working, hackable, elegant, and instructional.   Some is simple, some is complex. 
Best of all, you got it when you downloaded Python itself.   It's in your Python library directory.    Nothing more to do except start poking around. 

A:

Just do it. 
Seriously, you're never going to learn to be a good programmer until you write some programs.   First you'll write bad programs, then you'll fix them, then you'll write better ones, etc...
If you aren't insatiably motivated to try coding, then maybe it isn't for you.   One way to get motivated is to get a job that requires you to code... for me, there's nothing like having my salary and pride on the line to get me working :)

