The AI Engineering Bootcamp

An up-to-date and hands-on tutorial for building production-grade LLM applications

In The AI Engineering Bootcamp: Build, Ship, Share, AI Makerspace co-founders “Dr. Greg” Loughnane and Chris “The Wiz” Alexiuk guide the reader through the foundational concepts and code needed to build production-grade Large Language Model (LLM) applications using leading open-source tooling. The book explains the four primary design patterns of generative AI—prompt engineering, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), fine-tuning, and agentic reasoning—and how to leverage them as first principles to build scalable LLM applications that are high-performance and efficient.

You'll find classroom-tested lessons that offer immediate insights into building LLM applications, as well as example projects to give you hands-on experience that can be immediately applied within your company or with your clients today. The AI Engineering Bootcamp provides everything you need, from your initial AI-assisted Interactive Development Environment (IDE) setup and first deployment to the boilerplate Python code you need to prototype LLM, RAG, agent, and multi-agent applications.

The book also covers how to prepare your prototypes for production by setting up open-source LLM and embedding model endpoints, leveraging caching for prompts and embeddings, and what you need to host and deploy your application on premise, and more! It includes a discussion of how to leverage emerging protocols, such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent protocol, which have dramatically impacted the agent landscape by 2025. While the authors provide an opinionated view of the best-practice open-source tooling based on the current landscape, you will avoid vendor lock-in to any specific Cloud Service Provider (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure).

You'll also discover:

• An authoritative examination of the core design pattern of in-context learning that underlies all modern AI apps and AI development
• Hands-on tutorials offering practical know-how into building an LLM app in the real-world
• A list of essential definitions and vocabulary that frequently come up in LLM software development

Perfect for software engineers and data scientists who aim to become AI Engineers, The AI Engineering Bootcamp is an invaluable resource for practitioners who want to build and ship production-grade LLM applications. Conceptually, this book can also be quite useful for technical product managers or AI Engineering leaders aiming to guide their teams' development efforts.