This book is a hands-on, design-first guide to understanding AI and building real AI applications. From chapter 2 onward, each chapter includes a full, step-by-step tutorial that takes you from a blank canvas to a working app: a virtual customer service assistant, a marketing advisor, a travel planner, a CRM-powered personalization engine, and more. The goal is for you to learn by doing—experiencing firsthand what it means to design, build, and deploy end-to-end AI solutions that solve problems.
The focus is on the durable parts of AI development. Prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic structures, tool design, and orchestration are the “primitives” of any AI application, and they will outlast any specific library or framework. By mastering them, you give yourself a foundation that stays relevant as the technology around you keeps changing.
To keep the journey enjoyable, fast, and accessible, the tutorials are built using two low-code environments: Langflow and KNIME. The concepts and patterns you’ll learn translate naturally to any tool or codebase you choose to work in later. By the last page, you’ll have a portfolio of working apps you can adapt to your own needs and a clear mental model for designing many more.
Who should read this book
The book is written for two primary categories of readers: