About Learning Python, 6th Edition

[Larger book cover]

[February 2025] A new, 6th Edition of the classic book Learning Python is now available.

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 book's prior 5th Edition can still serve as an introduction to Python but is now dated and needlessly convoluted by coverage of older Pythons. 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.

Changes

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 the prior edition. It also gives more focus to non-Windows platforms, including smartphones.

Among its new Python 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, and hash-based bytecode files.

Less technically, this edition also makes fictitious names in examples more gender neutral because it better defuses bias; drops the former Monty Python references because they can be confusing and might be divisive; and cuts both first-person voice and personal anecdotes because you're buying this book to learn Python, not an author's life story.

Sizes

All told, this edition trims some 350 pages in emedia and 450 in print from the prior edition's size.

In its print (paper) version, two advanced and optional chapters have been moved online as freely downloadable PDFs. Together with content mods, this helps reduce the print book's size to 1,169 pages—29% shorter and one pound lighter than the prior edition—and enables print-on-demand modes that ensure availability.

By contrast, this edition's ebook and online versions contain all chapters, including the two moved online in print, and most check in at 1,267 pages and 23% shorter than the prior edition. The Kindle ebook is an exception whose custom layout yields more pages, and ebooks have unique ISBN numbers that reflect their extended content.

Resources

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