AI Developer — Companion Textbook
Not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Anthropic or any course, certification body, or AI vendor. See About these books.
This book is being written. The chapter list below is the planned structure; chapters fill in over time. Follow the changelog for updates.
This book is a plain-language companion for the AI Developer track — building AI into real applications through code, tools, and APIs.
An AI Developer is a technical practitioner who can design, build, evaluate, and integrate AI-powered applications and solutions that solve real-world problems.
What this book covers
The Developer track is organized around eight competencies, one chapter each:
- Agent and workflow design
- Application and API integration
- Responsible AI coding-assistant configuration
- Evaluation, testing, and debugging
- Model selection and cost/latency optimization
- Prompt and context engineering
- Security and safe deployment
- Tool and MCP development
This book assumes you can already program. For the concepts underneath, see AI Fundamentals; for non-code AI skills, see AI Associate.
How chapters are structured
Plain explanation → worked example → "explain it back" → self-check → key terms.