Mark Lutz

Learning Python has been through five editions and roughly sixteen hundred pages, which is a standing joke among programmers and also why it is the copy people keep on the shelf. Lutz has run Python training courses since 1997, among the first anyone offered, and wrote Programming Python and the Pocket Reference alongside it. He was using the language years before anybody was hiring for it. The books come from O'Reilly, and the fifth edition covers both Python 2 and Python 3, which is part of why it runs so long.