1.1What this is
A book on applied AI engineering, written while I learn it. Applied AI engineering is the work between a model and a product: prompts and context, tools and structured output, evaluation, retrieval, agents, and the plain software engineering that keeps all of it running.
Each chapter will cover one of those skills: what it is, how I learned it, what I built to prove it, and what went wrong. Nothing goes in a chapter until I've done it.
1.2What is here so far
This foreword. The contents page lists the chapters I plan to write, marked not yet. They come from my own study plan and will change as I go.
The course I study from is AI Engineering from Scratch by Rohit Ghumare. It's free and open, 20 phases from maths to agents, and every lesson ends in code and a test. I'm doing all of it, in order. This book is not a copy of it. Each chapter here is what I write back after the lessons it covers, in my words, with what I built. When you want the full picture, do the course.
1.3Versions
This is version 1.0.2. A patch is a fix or a reworded line. A minor is a new chapter. A major is a rewrite from the start. The changelog lists every version.
It's written in the same shape as my guide to C programming, which borrows its shape from Beej's guides.