Mark Lutz is the world leader in Python training, the author of Python's earliest and best-selling texts, and a pioneering figure in the Python community.Mark is the author of the popular O'Reilly books Programming Python, Python Pocket Reference, and Learning Python, all currently in 4th 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 mid 2010, Mark has instructed some 250 Python training sessions, taught some 4,000 students, and written Python books which have sold roughly a quarter of a million copies and been translated to over a dozen languages. Together, his Python efforts since 1992 have helped to establish it as one of the most widely-used programming languages in the world today. In addition, Mark holds BS and MS degrees in computer science from the University of Wisconsin where he explored implementations of the Prolog language, and over the last 25 years has worked as a professional software developer on compilers, programming tools, scripting applications, and assorted client/server systems. Mark maintains an additional book support site on the web at www.rmi.net/~lutz.