I'm in the same boat. I really tried to make use of it to learn Python, but it just spends a lot of time going into detail that an interested reader should be able to infer by doing exercises.
I'm actually a big fan of that kind of writing, and I tend to write in that way myself, but it doesn't work for "intro" or "tutorial" books. Jon Skeet's "C# In Depth" is a good example of a book that spends time making sure you really understand a concept six ways from Sunday, but that's the advertised point of the book. When it comes to learning something like a new language, I think Mr. Shaw's on to something, but to be honest I'd rather see sets of exercises like this become a wikified, edited-for-quality community project. The examples in the sample PDF are geared at beginners, but there's no reason that a larger set of simple examples and drills couldn't be created by topic (here's how to do stuff with databases; here's how to ping a server; here's how to talk to a web service) for more experienced users that grok the language and are more interested in learning the libraries.
Anyways, the thing I like about this idea the most is that it puts you in front of a machine with programming tools and has you make progress by doing things, not by reading prose.
