Welcome

Thank you for buying early access to our book Generative AI for the IT Pro. This book will help keep your skillset modern by laying out practical uses for AI at work. We know that there’s a lot of AI hype and it can be hard to parse through it all, but based on our experience, AI is here to stay and what we’ll be teaching you are now essential skills.

There are a lot of products out there making big promises — some will certainly keep those. But our book isn’t about covering every AI service available. Instead, we focus on foundational knowledge that you can apply to most services.

Requirements for this book are simple and even free. While premium AI subscriptions offer more features, starting off with free services like ChatGPT, Google Bard, or Microsoft Copilot will also work. Our primary tool throughout the book is ChatGPT Plus, which we find exceptionally capable and worth the $20/month subscription. Some functionality we use in prompt approaches may be limited to specific services, but there’s usually a workaround. If you’re serious about using the most flexible chatbot with the highest quality output, we recommend giving ChatGPT Plus a try while reading the book (it even comes with DALL-E so you can "draw" pictures!)