This book provides an introduction to Bitcoin programming but it is not intended for complete beginners. Still, the introductory chapters attempt to summarize what you need to know to progress with the rest of the material.
This book aims to be a practical guide and thus is full of examples either in the command-line or using Python programs. It is based in the open source Bitcoin library, python-bitcoin-utils that I have also created for educational purposes.
There is still a lot of work needed but the book has already quite substantive material. If you would like to contribute feel free to make a PR (and feel free to provide text if latex gives you trouble and I will convert).