Mastering Prompt Engineering

This book explains the principles, structure, and real-world practice of prompt engineering in a way that anyone working with large language models can understand and apply. Rather than treating prompting as a collection of hacks, it walks the reader through how to think about role, context, task, constraints, and examples so that LLMs produce reliable, domain-appropriate outputs. Starting from the basics of “what is a prompt,” the book then connects prompting to how generative AI models actually work, introduces core and advanced prompting patterns (prompt chaining, dynamic templates, tool-augmented prompting), and shows how to evaluate and refine model responses.Designed for students, educators, and practitioners, each chapter includes learning objectives and hands-on exercises that can be tried directly in tools like ChatGPT. Later chapters move from theory to application, demonstrating how to build LLM-powered chatbots and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, and how to incorporate ethics, safety, and bias awareness into prompt design. By the end, readers will have a reusable toolkit for crafting effective prompts across education, research, business, and technical use cases.

Akshay Bhuvaneswari Ramakrishnan is a data scientist and researcher specializing in applied artificial intelligence, medical informatics, and explainable machine learning. His work bridges computational modeling and clinical application, with a focus on interpretable frameworks for disease prediction, survival analysis, and multimodal data integration. He has held research positions at Johns Hopkins Medicine and the ACROSS Laboratory for Computational Sustainability, contributing to projects on ICU signal analytics, ocular disease recognition, and ecological modeling. Akshay’s professional experience spans academia, industry, and consulting, including roles as a Visiting Professor in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning Engineer at Bezoku LLC, and Data Engineer at Hitachi Energy. Akshay has authored more than 4 refereed journal papers, 9 international book chapters, 2 edited research volumes, 2 authored textbooks, and 4 peer-reviewed conference papers, alongside a patent in the domain of hybrid AI frameworks for healthcare decision support. His publications appear in reputed outlets such as Informatics in Medicine Unlocked, Applied AI Letters, and CRC Press series. As an Intel Software Innovator and Certified MLOps Professional, Akshay integrates high-performance computing tools such as Intel oneAPI to optimize deep learning pipelines. He has conducted over fifty workshops and training programs worldwide, empowering students and professionals in machine learning, MLOps, and prompt engineering. His research vision centers on building transparent, equitable, and computationally efficient AI systems for real-world decision support.P. Padmakumari is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at School of Computing, SASTRA Deemed University, Thanjavur, Tamilnadu, India. She received her Bachelor’s degree in science from Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India. She obtained her Master’s degree in computer applications from Anna University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. She also received her Master’s degree in computer science and engineering from SASTRA Deemed University, Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu, India. She received her Ph.D. degree from SASTRA Deemed University, Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu, India. She has 16 +years of teaching experience and her research focuses on scientific workflows on heterogeneous distributed systems, Machine learning, AI cloud computing, and fault tolerance. She contributed 20+ papers for many high-quality technology journals in SCI and Scopus that are edited by internationally acclaimed professors and professionals. She is also a reviewer for of several international journals.R. Manikandan obtained his Ph.D. in VLSI physical design from SASTRA Deemed University, India in 2014. He received his Bachelor of Engineering in computer science from Bharathidasan University in 1996 and Master of Technology in VLSI design from SASTRA Deemed University in 2002. He possesses three decades of academic and 15 years