Review: Prompt Engineering for Generative AI

There is a lot of hype around AI, specifically generative AI. I understand a lot of the concepts around ML, LLMs, and text analysis that I picked up through different parts of my education and career. I personally feel AI is a misnomer, but I’m digressing a little on the point. I wanted to get myself up to speed on prompt engineering techniques, so I can better understand how to leverage generative AI while coding and doing other daily tasks. I took a few free courses on JetBrains Academy which really moved the needle for me using AI coding assistants. I learned a few basic concepts like one-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought prompting which made a huge difference in the code I was able to generate compared the zero-shot prompting that I was using before.

After completing the courses, I decided there was more I could learn, so I purchased the book, Prompt Engineering for Generative AI by James Phoenix and Mike Taylor. It has been a great resource for diving deeper into the area of prompt engineering. The authors do a good job of providing theory, introductions to the common models, and code examples on how to build solutions for yourself. They cover a lot of more advanced topics than just the basics. I really enjoyed the chapter on autonomous agents. I was also pleasantly surprised by three chapters on image generation. The image generation I found way more interesting than some of the other use cases. They do a great job of explaining how you can build your own image generation tool set. I thought it would have potential for marketing teams being able to generate stock photos for products a lot quicker than by actually taking photos. Finally, the book wraps up with building an application in Python for writing blog posts. Now, I didn’t like the concept; however, there is a lot of good information within that chapter that brings everything together.

I would recommend this book to anyone that wanted to learn more about prompt engineering, prompting techniques, and building generative AI solutions. I’ve already been able to put this information to good use which has made me more effective using coding assistants. As I’ve learned more and moved past the hype, I’ve started to see the true potential in these tools.

This book can also be purchased from my Bookshop.org shop here.

Thanks for reading,

Jamie

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