Applied AI Engineering · Volume II
Prompt Engineering
Designing, Testing, and Defending AI Instructions
In development Chapter plan approved. Drafting in progress.
About this volume
Volume II is about control. It treats a prompt as an engineered artifact with a specification, a test suite, and a regression history — not as a phrase you tune until the output looks right.
It introduces the series' signature methodology: the AI Review Board and the Critique Board, two distinct evaluation structures that answer different questions about a system you are about to ship.
Mission
Make a model do what you specify, provably — through systematic prompt design, structured outputs, evaluation, and the Review Board methodology.
Prerequisites. Volume I, or equivalent working knowledge of LLMs. Programming experience in at least one language.
Details
| Series | Applied AI Engineering, Volume II |
|---|---|
| Author | Dr. Ahmed AlSalih |
| Publisher | Nexoma Labs LLC |
| Edition | First Edition |
| Chapters | 20 |
| Difficulty | Intermediate to Advanced |
| Formats | Paperback, Hardcover, Kindle, EPUB, PDF |
| Status | In development |
Contents
20 chapters. Chapter numbering restarts at 1 in every volume; cross-volume references are written as Volume III, Chapter 4.
- Introduction to Prompt Engineering
- Prompt Anatomy
- Instruction Design
- Context Design
- System Prompts and Persistent Instruction Files
- Role Prompting
- Few-Shot Learning
- Structured Outputs and Schema-Constrained Generation
- Output Control and Formatting
- Reasoning Strategies and Thinking Budgets
- Prompt Caching as a Design Constraint
- Prompt Evaluation
- Evaluation Harnesses and LLM-as-Judge
- Prompt Testing and Regression Suites
- Prompt Debugging
- Prompt Optimization
- The AI Review Board
- The Critique Board
- Patterns, Anti-Patterns, and Reusable Frameworks
- Capstone Project
Teaching this volume?
Slides, syllabi, teaching notes, and assessment keys are free to verified instructors.
Instructor resources