Make y'all a deal - I'll teach you English and you teach me Python...
More seriously, thanks for the recommendations. Will hunt a few of them down. Online tutorials are good too, but I still like books on paper. Among other things, you can throw them across the room in frustration, and they're often little the worse for it. Can't say that for a PDF on a PC. S.
PS - One thing I've not seen yet (I'm sure there's a way) is hunting down exactly which COM port the USB<->RS232 gadget winds up at. I've seen some seriously silly numbers, and they're not that hard to hunt down in something like the Device Manager, but a program to do so automatically might have to ramble through lots of them sending some query and expecting some unique response. Easily done, but more hassle... S.