About Learning Python, 6th Edition

[February 2025] A new, 6th Edition of the classic book Learning Python has been released.

After six months of writing, this edition was submitted to its publisher in September 2024, and an "Early Release" version appeared online in November 2024. The final version was released as a 1,300-page emedia book and 1,200-page print book on February 25, 2025 and became available in print, ebook, online, and Kindle formats over the following month.

This edition drops coverage of the now-sunsetted Python 2.X line and updates its content to be current with Python 3.12 and the decade of changes since its prior edition. It also gives more focus to non-Windows platforms, including smartphones, and trims some 350 pages in emedia and 450 in print.

Among its new 3.X content, this edition covers f-string literals, named-assignment expressions, match statements, type hinting, async coroutines, exception groups, underscore digit separators, module attribute hooks, star-unpacking proliferation, main-script package files, dictionary-key insertion order, positional-only function arguments, hash-based bytecode files, and other additions, deprecations, and changes.

This book's prior 5th Edition can still serve as a useful introduction to Python but is now dated and needlessly convoluted by 2.X coverage. The 6th Edition is much more current with today's Python language and world and benefits from the improvements that naturally flow from a full rewrite cycle.