I wrote this as a guide for a financial analyst friend of mine looking to learn Python. He is already fairly well versed in doing Project Euler problems in Ruby. All italicized text is for the benefit of any other readers, such as yourself.
Each section is divided into a short resource (10 minutes or less), a long resource (days to weeks or more), and a challenge.
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So what you're looking to do is to be able to recreate financial models in code. And other types of models. This is a noble pursuit.