Agentic AI Books 2026: Gulli vs Lanham vs Huyen
Verdict: Of the four agentic AI books worth your time in 2026, Antonio Gulli's Agentic Design Patterns wins for most builders. It is the most pattern-complete of the set, it works as a desk reference rather than a one-pass read, and the author made the full pre-print PDF and per-chapter notebooks publicly available, so the effective cost of entry is nothing. Micheal Lanham's AI Agents in Action,…
In 2026, there are four agentic AI books worth reading, each serving a different purpose. Antonio Gulli's "Agentic Design Patterns" is the top recommendation for builders, as it offers the most comprehensive set of patterns and serves as an excellent desk reference. The book is available for free through a community mirror that provides a pre-print PDF and chapter notebooks, making it accessible and cost-free.
"AI Agents in Action, Second Edition" by Michael Lanham is the runner-up and the better choice if you want to learn about the current production stack, covering the OpenAI Agents SDK, MCP, and A2A. Chip Huyen's "AI Engineering" is best suited for those focusing on evaluation discipline, with 534 pages dedicated to agents and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
Lastly, "Building Agentic AI Systems" by Anjanava Biswas and Wrick Talukdar is recommended for enterprise architects who prefer orchestration diagrams and governance aspects.
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