About Learning Python, 6th Edition

[September 2024] 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 likely be released as a 1,300-page book (1,200 in print per below) in February 2025. Its online version is 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 estimated pages.

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

This page will be updated as the 6th Edition's logistics firm up. For now, you're welcome to read the current 5th Edition, which still serves as a useful introduction to the language. If you're able to wait, though, 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—some 25% slimmer than the prior edition—and enables print-on-demand modes that will avoid past 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.