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★★★★★ 4
Understanding AI prompts as a science
Format: Audiobook
Prompt engineering is the art and science of finding the right words to generate the right responses from artificial intelligence (AI). It's becoming a skill in-demand in today's workplaces. It's also becoming an essential skill for life. To understand prompt engineering, you must understand how AI tools understand their inputs. This book explains that to you in many forms.
It covers prompting as it intersects all the major AI disciplines, like general prompts (as in a ChatBot), fine-tuning, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). It also introduces how prompting intersects a couple of image-generation tools.
As a scientist, I appreciate the theoretical approach to these practical matters. Too many people are hacks at AI these days, and any technical understanding can rapidly advance an individual's effectiveness. Prompt engineering is often made fun of as a "soft" topic, but as this book demonstrates, it intersects all the major AI areas. Presumably less garbage in means less garbage out. This book shows how you can make that take place.
As typical for O'Reilly materials, this book appeals to people who desire an intermediate-to-advanced understanding of how AI works. It's not for the casual user. Anyone technical involved in professional knowledge generation using AI can benefit from understanding the dynamics "under the hood." It's a good, though perhaps not ground-breaking, textbook for those of us unable to take a class in the subject. Prompt engineering may be a soft topic to many, but books like this ground the field in the science that can make or break a digital or software product.
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Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2025
