AI Agents in Action Releases Second Edition Guide

AI Agents in Action, Second Edition, authored by Micheal Lanham, has been published in a new, substantially updated edition that concentrates on building and deploying intelligent agent systems. Per Manning's online preview, the edition was published in June 2026 and the publisher provides a free extract of early chapters on Manning.com. The book is listed as 392 pages with ISBN-13 978-1633434530 on catalog pages including WOW! eBook and O'Reilly. Retail listings on Amazon show a paperback release date of July 14, 2026 and a pre-order price of $59.99.

The second edition documents core agent components and practical workflows. Manning and O'Reilly table-of-contents excerpts list chapter-level material on LLMs, agent personas, tools and actions, knowledge and memory, retrieval and augmentation, reasoning and planning, evaluation and feedback, and multi-agent architectures such as hub-and-spoke orchestrations and agent collaboration. The book explicitly introduces the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and discusses agent-to-agent interactions (A2A) and multi-agent coordination patterns, per the publisher preview on Manning.com and the O'Reilly catalog.

Industry-pattern observations: developer-focused, example-driven books that combine conceptual layers (persona, tools, memory, planning) with concrete code examples accelerate team adoption of agentic patterns. Readers looking to move from single-turn LLM prompts to longer-lived, stateful workflows often need hands-on recipes for memory management, tool integration, and evaluation; the book's chapter breakdown mirrors those practitioner needs.

agentic systems remain a key area for applied ML and software engineering because they bridge LLM capabilities with external tools and state. Comprehensive, up-to-date resources that cover MCP, agent orchestration, and evaluation frameworks address recurring gaps in practitioner knowledge: designing typed outputs, tracing tool use, and assembling multi-agent flows. Manning's author note in the preview captures this teaching aim: "I hope this book inspires you to see intelligent agents as partners in innovation," per the Manning online extract.

watch for sample repositories, code walkthroughs, and any publisher-provided exercises that accompany the book; Manning's live preview notes exercises in agent building and O'Reilly lists chapter exercises and runtime topics. Observers should also track whether the author or publisher publishes companion code, notebooks, or a GitHub repo that implements the MCP examples and multi-agent orchestrations described in the text.