The short bookshelf

Do not try to read a dozen books cover to cover. These five cover the durable ideas behind this guide:

  1. 1
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    AI Engineering
    Chip Huyen

    Building and evaluating applications with foundation models.

  2. 2
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    Hands-On Large Language Models
    Jay Alammar and Maarten Grootendorst

    Practical LLM foundations with an accompanying code repository.

  3. 3
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    Software Engineering at Google
    Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright

    Free online; especially code review, testing, dependency management, and large-scale change.

  4. 4
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    Threat Modeling: Designing for Security
    Adam Shostack

    Security reasoning that remains useful when the attack surface includes agents and tools.

  5. 5
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    Accelerate
    Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim

    Measuring whether a development system actually improves.