In this paper, we consider the full compressible Navier–Stokes equations in N(e66cf32d86795abc4bcd7" title="Click to view the MathML source">N≥2) space dimension with cylindrical or spherical symmetric initial data. The global existence of strong and classical solutions is established. The analysis is based on some delicate a priori estimates which depend on the assumption κ(θ)=θq where 9c761cdc898dead2b" title="Click to view the MathML source">q⩾0 and 8e37c3bcea0cbf">. Compared with the results in Wen and Zhu (2014) and Qin, Yang, Yao and Zhou (2015), our results relax the restriction e6f685a82b3858edfb75928ab2" title="Click to view the MathML source">q>0, when there is no initial vacuum and include the global existence of classical solutions for both the cylindrical or spherical symmetric cases, respectively. It should point out that we obtain the global classical solutions with the help of weighted 984edf" title="Click to view the MathML source">H3 estimates of 9c10381aff51089309" title="Click to view the MathML source">(u,v,w,θ).