AI Prompt Engineering Absolute Beginner’s Guide

AI Prompt Engineering Absolute Beginner’s Guide, by best-selling author Michael Miller (writer of 200+ practical tech books), teaches readers how to craft effective prompts that unlock the full power of generative AI. You’ll learn what generative AI can (and can’t) do, why well-structured prompts matter, and how to craft them step-by-step for the results you actually want.

This approachable guide walks you through the anatomy of a great prompt--defining clear goals, outputs, constraints, tone, and style--then builds your skills with proven prompting strategies. You’ll also learn how to evaluate prompt performance, troubleshoot underperforming prompts, and refine your prompts with iterative techniques. Even better, you’ll learn how to construct prompts for specific tasks (productivity, writing, image generation, and more) and take advantage of a large library of prompt templates.

Whether you are a casual user or a professional in content creation, marketing, education, or tech, this book helps you unlock the full power of today’s AI tools. With practical examples and real-world use cases, you will learn how to evaluate performance, refine and iterate, troubleshoot weak outputs, and use AI responsibly.

This book will help you with:

• Understanding how generative AI works and why prompts matter
• Structuring the anatomy of clear, specific, goal-oriented prompts
• Defining outputs, constraints, tone, and style to guide results
• Applying zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot prompting techniques
• Using chain-of-thought and self-consistency to improve reasoning
• Adopting role- and persona-based prompting for better context
• Building prompt chains and multimodal prompts (text, image, video)
• Evaluating prompt performance and iterating for improvement
• Generating higher-quality text, images, and videos for real use cases
• Troubleshooting weak outputs and practicing responsible, ethical prompting