About Learning Python, 6th Edition

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

After six months of writing, a final draft of this edition was submitted to its publisher in September 2024. This new edition will be released as a 1,300-page book (1,200 in print per below) in late February 2025, with ebook, online, and print books available shortly after release. Its online version became available in "Early Release" form in November 2024.

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 (450 in print).

Among its new 3.X content, this edition covers f-string literals, named-assignment expressions, match statements, type hinting, async coroutines, underscore digit separators, exception groups, 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. If you're able to upgrade, the 6th Edition will be more current with today's Python language and world and will benefit from the improvements that naturally flow from a full rewrite cycle.

Size update: in the print (paper) version of this edition, two advanced and optional chapters will be moved online as freely downloadable PDFs. This helps bring the print book's size down to 1,200 pages—over 25% slimmer than the prior edition—and enables print-on-demand modes that will help avoid inventory outages. The ebook and online versions of this edition will contain all chapters, including the two moved online in print, and check in at 1,300 pages.