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Book details
- ISBN-10109815343X
- ISBN-13978-1098153434
- Edition1st
- PublisherO'Reilly Media
- Publication dateJune 25, 2024
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions7.25 x 0.75 x 9.5 inches
- Print length422 pages
Large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion have unprecedented potential. Because they have been trained on all the public text and images on the internet, they can make useful contributions to a wide variety of tasks. And with the barrier to entry greatly reduced today, practically any developer can harness LLMs and diffusion models to tackle problems previously unsuitable for automation.
With this book, you'll gain a solid foundation in generative AI, including how to apply these models in practice. When first integrating LLMs and diffusion models into their workflows, most developers struggle to coax reliable enough results from them to use in automated systems. Authors James Phoenix and Mike Taylor show you how a set of principles called prompt engineering can enable you to work effectively with AI.
Learn how to empower AI to work for you. This book explains:
- The structure of the interaction chain of your program's AI model and the fine-grained steps in between
- How AI model requests arise from transforming the application problem into a document completion problem in the model training domain
- The influence of LLM and diffusion model architecture—and how to best interact with it
- How these principles apply in practice in the domains of natural language processing, text and image generation, and code
Review
—Dan Shipper, cofounder & CEO, Every
"This book is a solid introduction to the fundamentals of prompt engineering and generative AI. The authors cover a wide range of useful techniques for all skill levels from beginner to advanced in a simple, practical, and easy-to-understand way. If you're looking to improve the accuracy and reliability of your AI systems, this book should be on your shelf."
-Mayo Oshin, founder and CEO, Siennai Analytics, early LangChain contributor
"Phoenix and Taylor's guide is a lighthouse amidst the vast ocean of generative AI. Their book became a cornerstone for my team at Phiture AI Labs, as we learned to harness LLMs and diffusion models for creating marketing assets that resonate with the essence of our clients' apps and games. Through prompt engineering, we've been able to generate bespoke, on-brand content at scale. This isn't just theory; it's a practical masterclass in transforming AI's raw potential into tailored solutions, making it an essential read for developers looking to elevate their AI integration to new heights of creativity and efficiency."
—Moritz Daan, Founder/Partner, Phiture Mobile Growth Consultancy
"Prompt Engineering for Generative AI is probably the most future-proof way of future-proofing your tech career. This is without a doubt the best resource for anyone working in practical applications of AI. The rich, refined principles in here will help both new and seasoned AI engineers stay on top of this very competitive game for the foreseeable future."
- Ellis Crosby, CTO and cofounder, Incremento
"This is an essential guide for agency and service professionals. Integrating AI with service and client delivery, using automation management, and speeding up solutions will set new industry standards. You'll find useful, practical information and tactics in the book, allowing you to understand and utilize AI to its full potential."
- Byron Tassoni-Resch, CEO and cofounder, WeDiscover
From the Author
The Five Principles of Prompting are:
- Give Direction: Describe the desired style in detail, or reference a relevant persona.
- Specify Format: Define what rules to follow, and the required structure of the response.
- Provide Examples: Insert a diverse set of test cases where the task was done correctly.
- Evaluate Quality: Identify errors and rate responses, testing what drives performance.
- Divide Labor: Split tasks into multiple steps, chained together for complex goals.
We first published these principles as a blog post in July 2022, and they have stood the test of time, including mapping quite closely to OpenAI's own Prompt Engineering Guide, which came a year later. Anyone who works closely with generative AI is likely to converge on a similar set of strategies for solving common issues, but this book is designed to get you there quicker.
Throughout this book you'll see hundreds of demonstrative examples of prompting techniques, including both text and image prompting, as well as using Python to build AI automation scripts and products. This isn't a list of prompting hacks to find the right combination of magic words, it's a practical guide for building systems that provide the right context to AI applications, as well as how to test and scale AI systems for production.
The book will be useful for you if:
- Your time is worth more than 40 dollars an hour, and saving a few hours reading this book instead of piecing everything together from multiple sources is worth it to you.
- You're not just using AI casually but you're actually building an AI application or internal template many people will use hundreds or thousands of times a day.
- You want tips for reducing hallucination and improving the reliability of AI, while learning from 100s of real-world examples of how to solve common issues working with AI.
- You'd like to compare the strengths and weaknesses of OpenAI vs other models, as well as common frameworks like LangChain, different vector database options, and AUTOMATIC1111
- You want to see what it looks like to build an end-to-end AI application, from a naive prompt to a full AI agent, including building a basic user interface with Gradio
About the Author
Mike Taylor built and ran a 50-person marketing agency, including working on innovation projects with Unilever, Nestle, and Facebook. Over 300,000 people have taken his marketing courses on LinkedIn Learning.
About the authors
Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.I graduated with a master’s degree in Economics, then worked across a number of growth roles at startups, before co-founding a marketing agency and growing it to 50 people. After exiting I created courses on LinkedIn and Udemy taken by over 350,000 people, wrote a self-published book called Marketing Memetics, and a book for O'Reilly on Prompt Engineering for Generative AI. Today, I'm focused on building AI products through Brightpool.
James Phoenix has a background in building reliable data pipelines and software for marketing teams, including automation of thousands of recurring marketing tasks. He has taught 60+ Data Science bootcamps for General Assembly.
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From the Publisher

From the Preface
The rapid pace of innovation in generative AI promises to change how we live and work, but it’s getting increasingly difficult to keep up. The number of AI papers published on arXiv is growing exponentially, Stable Diffusion has been among the fastest growing open source projects in history, and AI art tool Midjourney’s Discord server has tens of millions of members, surpassing even the largest gaming communities. What most captured the public’s imagination was OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT, which reached 100 million users in two months, making it the fastest-growing consumer app in history. Learning to work with AI has quickly become one of the most in-demand skills.
Everyone using AI professionally quickly learns that the quality of the output depends heavily on what you provide as input. The discipline of prompt engineering has arisen as a set of best practices for improving the reliability, efficiency, and accuracy of AI models. “In ten years, half of the world’s jobs will be in prompt engineering,” claims Robin Li, the cofounder and CEO of Chinese tech giant Baidu. However, we expect prompting to be a skill required of many jobs, akin to proficiency in Microsoft Excel, rather than a popular job title in itself. This new wave of disruption is changing everything we thought we knew about computers. We’re used to writing algorithms that return the same result every time—not so for AI, where the responses are non-deterministic. Cost and latency are real factors again, after decades of Moore’s law making us complacent in expecting real-time computation at negligible cost. The biggest hurdle is the tendency of these models to confidently make things up, dubbed hallucination, causing us to rethink the way we evaluate the accuracy of our work.
We’ve been working with generative AI since the GPT-3 beta in 2020, and as we saw the models progress, many early prompting tricks and hacks became no longer necessary. Over time a consistent set of principles emerged that were still useful with the newer models, and worked across both text and image generation. We have written this book based on these timeless principles, helping you learn transferable skills that will continue to be useful no matter what happens with AI over the next five years. The key to working with AI isn’t “figuring out how to hack the prompt by adding one magic word to the end that changes everything else,” as OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman asserts, but what will always matter is the “quality of ideas and the understanding of what you want.” While we don’t know if we’ll call it “prompt engineering” in five years, working effectively with generative AI will only become more important.
Product information
Publisher | O'Reilly Media |
Publication date | June 25, 2024 |
Edition | 1st |
Language | English |
Print length | 422 pages |
ISBN-10 | 109815343X |
ISBN-13 | 978-1098153434 |
Item Weight | 7.4 ounces |
Dimensions | 7.25 x 0.75 x 9.5 inches |
Best Sellers Rank |
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Customer Reviews | 4.4 out of 5 stars 60Reviews |
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- 5.0 out of 5 starsVerified PurchaseA wonderful primer for those discovering the amazing world of generative AIReviewed in the United States on August 3, 2024Format: PaperbackSomewhere in the past year, ChatGPT has gone from "cool, interesting, amusing" to a massively valuable work assistant capable of writing Python scripts, analysing data, and doing lots, lots, more. The key to this? The rapid evolution of OpenAI's GPT models and...Somewhere in the past year, ChatGPT has gone from "cool, interesting, amusing" to a massively valuable work assistant capable of writing Python scripts, analysing data, and doing lots, lots, more. The key to this? The rapid evolution of OpenAI's GPT models and making my first forays into prompt engineering.
If I thought I was getting good, though, this book took me reminded me that I'm just scratching the surface. Halfway through the first chapter I was already furiously scribbling notes in the margins for what I could do better with my prompt writing and by the end of the text I felt like I had gotten a very good grounding - not just in GPTs specifically but in the bigger picture of how these hugely powerful tools were trained and came to maturity.
I imagine that few will argue with my assertion that there is lots of hyperbole and "noise" in the AI space right now which, as ever, makes it hard to pick out the signal from the noise. Which is precisely why I sought out an O'Reilly title and I'm very glad that I did.
Thorough, excellent, and I hope that this edition will be the first of many. As this rapidly maturing field scales and matures I think that prompt engineering will be an essential discipline to master. Pick up this text to get a good foothold on things.
- 4.0 out of 5 starsVerified PurchaseHelpful for GPT/LangChain frameworkReviewed in the United States on August 7, 2024Format: PaperbackI applaud the authors for putting forth a comprehensive introduction in a rapidly evolving space. I absorbed a lot, helpful as I was developing a prototype — using open source methods. And that’s where I was disappointed. The LLM and examples are highly adapted...I applaud the authors for putting forth a comprehensive introduction in a rapidly evolving space. I absorbed a lot, helpful as I was developing a prototype — using open source methods.
And that’s where I was disappointed. The LLM and examples are highly adapted to OpenAI’s GPT-x and the bulky LangChain framework, something not obvious until you dig in to the book. Sure, this may be where newbie demand was when the authors began writing. But as the open source models and OpenAI alternatives gain speed (e.g. Llama 3.1, Groq, etc.) this book may quickly need an updated and expanded version to stay relevant.
- 5.0 out of 5 starsVerified PurchaseComprehensive Guide with Practical InsightsReviewed in the United States on June 25, 2024Format: PaperbackThis is a solid book for understanding the art and science of working with LLMs and other generative AI models. I always struggled with getting the output I was looking for, and wasn't sure how best to "ask" the models for what I wanted. This book did a great...This is a solid book for understanding the art and science of working with LLMs and other generative AI models. I always struggled with getting the output I was looking for, and wasn't sure how best to "ask" the models for what I wanted. This book did a great job of laying out the strategies and practical guidance to craft the prompts. There were a lot of tips and tricks, but the overall understanding and framework around prompt engineering has been super useful.
- 5.0 out of 5 starsVerified PurchaseCOLOR!!!Reviewed in the United States on October 16, 2024Format: PaperbackI know this may seem superficial, but the fact that ORA has now included color printing to their zoo collection takes this to another level.
- 5.0 out of 5 starsVerified PurchaseA must read!Reviewed in the United States on June 25, 2024Format: PaperbackHands down, the best book on prompt engineering and implementing LLMs. Really enjoyed Michael and James deep dive. Whether you're technical or not, this book is foundational to a deeper understanding in how to properly explore and implement LLMs.
- 5.0 out of 5 starsVerified PurchaseNecessary book to actually get value from AI toolsReviewed in the United States on June 21, 2024Format: KindleIf you don't know how to prompt AI models correctly, you're missing out on substantially better results. This book has literally everything I could have asked for, it's an awesome resource.
- 5.0 out of 5 starsJust finished Chapter 1- already a goldmine of information.Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2024Format: PaperbackI live in the world of AI, yet already learned so much from the beginning of the book. The things I do daily, by rote, now have frameworks, logic, and explanations for why they are so. Looking forward to the rest of the book!
Top reviews from other countries
- Sokol83.0 out of 5 starsVerified Purchasebook is ok butReviewed in Canada on December 2, 2024The book is ok yet I think you would get more for less if you just google for docs and articles on the web
- Mindy Molly5.0 out of 5 starsVerified PurchaseI have an in-depth reference tool.?Reviewed in Australia on June 10, 2025Great book! I am using it in conjunction with the authors training course.
- Robert Desmond5.0 out of 5 starsVerified PurchaseTransformational Content (excuse the pun)Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 21, 2024These guys are two of the most experienced prompters in the world right now and have made this book incredibly accessible to allow us all to prompt like a pro, but also to understand the underlying technology and take advantage of the opportunities that there are with ai...These guys are two of the most experienced prompters in the world right now and have made this book incredibly accessible to allow us all to prompt like a pro, but also to understand the underlying technology and take advantage of the opportunities that there are with ai right now.
- Fabian G.5.0 out of 5 starsVerified PurchaseGreat book, detailed and practical adviceReviewed in Germany on July 9, 2024This book on prompt engineering is an absolute gem! As someone delving into the intricacies of AI and language models, I found this resource incredibly valuable. The author does a fantastic job of breaking down complex concepts into manageable, easy-to-understand sections....This book on prompt engineering is an absolute gem! As someone delving into the intricacies of AI and language models, I found this resource incredibly valuable. The author does a fantastic job of breaking down complex concepts into manageable, easy-to-understand sections. The practical advice is where this book truly shines. Each chapter is filled with real-world examples and step-by-step guides that make applying the techniques straightforward. Whether you're a novice just starting out or a seasoned professional looking to refine your skills, there's something here for everyone.
- Pat5.0 out of 5 starsVerified PurchaseVery comprehensive bookReviewed in Belgium on August 10, 2024Gives a thorough introduction to prompt engineering . Some Python coding skills required
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