The Developer's Guide to AI: A Field Guide for the Working Developer -- Jacob Orshalick, Paperback
Build intelligent applications--no data science degree required. Your boss is pitching new AI features. Your team is buzzing about MCP servers. Job postings are asking for AI experience with RAG, vector databases, fine-tuning, and agents. You can feel the excitement. You see the potential. You may be wondering how to get started in AI without a data science degree. You're in the right place. The Developer's Guide to AI gives working developers a practical path through the terminology, tools, and implementation patterns that matter. It shows you how to build with AI using the tools you already know: JavaScript, Python, APIs, SDKs, and databases. By the end of this book, you'll know how to:
- Call LLM APIs and stream intelligent responses directly to your UI.
- Engineer prompts that produce reliable, production-ready results.
- Build RAG pipelines using vector databases to give AI access to your private data.
- Fine-tune models with LoRA for specialized tasks like classification.
- Deploy AI agents using tool-calling and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to reason and act inside real workflows.
Author: Jacob Orshalick
Publisher: No Starch Press
Published: 6/9/2026
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.3 lbs
Size: 9.1" H x 7" L x 0.9" W
ISBN: 9781718504769
