Mark Lutz's Bio Page

Mark Lutz is the author of Python's classic and foundational texts, a former trainer with two decades of experience teaching Python to newcomers, and one of the people responsible for the prominence that Python enjoys today.

Mark wrote the three O'Reilly books Learning Python, Programming Python, and Python Pocket Reference, all currently in fourth, fifth, or sixth editions. He has been using and promoting Python since 1992, started writing Python books in 1995, and began teaching Python classes in 1997. As of 2025, Mark has:

• Taught 260 live and in-person Python classes to roughly 4,000 students, in a training career that spanned both continents and decades
• Written 15 Python books that span 30 years and 12K published pages, cover Pythons 1.X through 3.X, and are available in over a dozen languages

Together, Mark's three decades of Python efforts so far have helped to establish it as one of the most widely used programming languages in the world. Though no longer teaching formal classes today, he continues to advocate improvement in Python, open source, and the software field at large through his posts, programs, and books.

In addition, Mark has been a professional software developer for four decades. He earned BS and MS degrees in computer science from the University of Wisconsin where he explored implementations of the Prolog language, and over his career has worked on compilers, programming tools, scripting systems, and other applications and apps.

For more author background, see Mark's Teaching Python history and its image gallery, and browse his books-and-software website, learning-python.com. For contacts, click or tap the copyright link below.