Books Prompt Engineering by Lee Boonstra

"Prompt Engineering" by Lee Boonstra is a practical guide that delves into the art and science of crafting effective prompts for interacting with Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. The book emphasizes that prompt engineering is an iterative process of writing, testing, and refining instructions to achieve precise and useful AI outputs.

Key Points from the Book

Purpose of Prompt Engineering: It involves learning how to communicate with AI by framing clear, specific prompts to guide the model towards desired responses, improving accuracy and relevance.

Prompt Structure: Effective prompts often outline the task, provide context, and specify the tone or format expected in the output.

Prompt Techniques: Includes zero-shot (no examples), one-shot, and few-shot prompting (providing one or more examples within the prompt) to enhance output quality.

Advanced Methods: Techniques like Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting encourage models to reason step-by-step, while Step-back prompting involves starting broad then narrowing focus. Self-consistency runs multiple iterations for better reliability.

AI Model Configuration: The book explains parameters such as temperature (for randomness) and top-k/top-p sampling (limits on token selection) that affect responses.

Applications: Lee Boonstra shares experience from real-world enterprise use cases, underlining that prompt engineering is crucial for deploying AI effectively beyond simple tasks.