I know for a fact that vypr learned much about string sanitisation in Python after me and dcat started being ourselves.

I know that google has a Python class that's available with examples and worked through examples for their excercises, all available for free. The videos are available on youtube. Admittedly it's made for C/Java migrants (I already had some FORTRAN90 and C experience at the time) but if you're determined and take it slow you should have no problems.