Unicode characters in Python console

Recently I've have had a look at a Python language. A played a bit with it, but found that I feel uncomfortable with it without a proper introduction. I've decided to go with Learn Python the Hard Way, even though it's biasied towards unexpirienced programmers, but the book name intrigued me and I've actually heard that book name for some time with positive recommendations. So, somethere around Lesson 1, there you print to a console, I've decided to try out printing in non-English language, Russian in particular, just to see how it goes. It didn't worked. So I headed to Stack Overflow. But even there I've spend a lot (relatively) of time to find solution that actually worked for me.

During this search I also found Python Unicode handling is confusing to say the least. I guess it's a matter of some time of studying the subject, but that is really annoying since string is the thing that you usually work a lot with. Because of that I find that Python feels like a JavaScript mixed with a C.

P.S. I also think Python Tools for Visual Studio is probably the best IDE to learn (and work) with Python on Windows, especially if you are a long time Visual Studio user, you will feel right at home.

Python Tools for Visual Studio 2010

There is an incredible product available to all of us. Not only it's extremely nice to have Python language in VS, but to me no less important that it's also open source. There is a lot of open source code, but I think this one is specifically valuable since it covers a lot of aspects of VS integration at all levels, and it's from Microsoft.

P.S. some videos on features.