Mark Lutz

Bio

Mark Lutz is the author of Python's foundational and best-selling 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 is the author of the three O'Reilly books Learning Python, Programming Python, and Python Pocket Reference, all currently in fourth or fifth 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 late 2018, 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 and written 14 Python books that have sold over 650,000 units, span 11,000 published pages, cover Pythons 1.X through 3.X, and have been translated to at least a dozen languages.

Together, Mark's quarter century 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 software professional for over three decades. He holds 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 as a software developer on compilers, programming tools, scripting systems, and assorted client/server and business applications.

For more author background, see Mark's Teaching Python and supplemental bio pages; his former training web site at learning-python.com/training; and his books and software site at learning-python.com.