Artificial Intelligence – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Practical Generative AI with ChatGPT: Unleash Your Prompt Engineering Potential with OpenAI Technologies for Productivity and Creativity

By Scott J. Pearson | February 5, 2026February 5, 2026 by Scott J. Pearson

Most of us are impressed with how well Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently advanced, but we’re still struggling to use it to improve our personal productivity. We’ve heard of the promises but fear the shortcomings, too. Books like Valentina Alto’s Practical Generative AI with ChatGPT can point the way to us capitalizing on the promise in our personal work. Alto briefly covers the topic of Prompt Engineering that’s key to making the most out of…

Designing Machine Learning Systems: An Iterative Process for Production-Ready Applications

By Scott J. Pearson | January 14, 2026January 14, 2026 by Scott J. Pearson

Machine learning (ML) is a hot yet daunting topic. It’s perhaps the most important technological advancement supporting the revolution in artificial intelligence (AI), and most leading IT companies have been extracting value from it for some time. Almost every time predictions are made by a computer, like when a product or really anything is recommended, ML is at work. This book explains in technical detail how to get ML projects out of theory and into…

Artificial Intelligence

A Simple Guide to Retrieval Augmented Generation

By Scott J. Pearson | December 18, 2025December 18, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a process in artificial intelligence (AI) where specific documents can be consulted to provide an answer. It provides a way for individual groups to customize a bot for their internal uses. For example, a company can provide business policies specific to their own organization. Or healthcare firms can provide literature up to date with their own fields, not just the latest AI build of the foundation model. Frankly, this topic confused…

Artificial Intelligence Indie

The Complete Guide to Microsoft Agent Framework: Build, Test & Manage AI Agents that Integrate Seamlessly with Azure, M365 & Business APIs

By Scott J. Pearson | December 17, 2025December 17, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

This book seeks to teach readers how to write Python or .NET code to perform certain tasks as Agents within Microsoft’s AI platform. Unfortunately, it’s heavy on code and light on concepts. I wish it’d teach more about how to integrate with Azure’s web interface instead of the command line alone. It does succeed at showing many examples of how to code agents, but it lacks a deep conceptual explanation of how agents integrate with…

Artificial Intelligence Indie

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) & Vector Databases: A Practical Guide for AI Developers

By Scott J. Pearson | December 17, 2025December 17, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is how artificial intelligence prioritizes facts in a given domain over and above all the information the basic, foundational model offers. It allows businesses, scientists, and others to prioritize their custom knowledge instead of making up answers. It’s an extremely powerful tool that most AI users don’t understand. This book tries to explain the basics of a RAG system in Python code. Unfortunately, despite a grasp on the basics of RAG, it…

Artificial Intelligence

Prompt Engineering for Generative AI: Future-Proof Inputs for Reliable AI Outputs

By Scott J. Pearson | December 13, 2025December 13, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Prompt engineering is the art and science of finding the right words to generate the right responses from artificial intelligence (AI). It’s becoming a skill in-demand in today’s workplaces. It’s also becoming an essential skill for life. To understand prompt engineering, you must understand how AI tools understand their inputs. This book explains that to you in many forms. It covers prompting as it intersects all the major AI disciplines, like general prompts (as in…

Artificial Intelligence Software-Technology

Developing Apps with GPT-4 and ChatGPT: Build Intelligent Chatbots, Content Generators & More

By Scott J. Pearson | December 3, 2025December 3, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Everyone today seems to want to do something with artificial intelligence (AI), but few seem to know how to do it well. We’ve started to see how AI bots can induce horrors, and business leaders plead to avoid those risks. ChatGPT, packaged from OpenAI, remains the dominant, most trusted AI tool even though many other versions exist. It’d be nice if we software folks could stop and get a masters degree in AI, but life…

Artificial Intelligence Science

AI for Scientific Discovery: Proceedings of a Workshop by the National Academies

By Scott J. Pearson | November 8, 2025November 8, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine guide America’s federal research policies based on identifying challenges in the field. This 2024 workshop looked at opportunities within scientific research for artificial intelligence (AI) to contribute. It was led by national experts discussing use cases in their research and attempted to generalize based on those experiences. Most use cases were from American-based science, but AI in Africa was a recurring theme. Overall, the abundance of unique…

Artificial Intelligence Software-Technology

AI Engineering: Building Applications with Foundation Models

By Scott J. Pearson | November 4, 2025November 8, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

It’s always daunting to pick up a technical book that’s over 500 pages long or 21 hours long. However, this book did not disappoint. Not every section, of course, addressed my particular needs. However, the entire treatise was clearly communicated with a broader technical audience in mind. That should be no surprise because Chip Huyen, besides being an AI expert, taught graduate school classes in AI at Stanford and writes science fiction as a side…

Artificial Intelligence Indie

Computational Linguistics & Artificial Intelligence

By Scott J. Pearson | July 19, 2025November 8, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

I work in software applications in biomedical research. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a natural interest impacting my work and team. I’m always looking for thoughtful explorations of the topic. I stumbled upon this book on Amazon and thought I’d give the audiobook a try. I’m glad I did. Though Daniel Dinkelman’s work is far from perfect, it provided a helpful survey of the research landscape across the landscape in computational linguistics and AI. It concisely…