Hands-On Large Language Models: Language Understanding and Generation

Description

Unlock the power of large language models with Hands‑On Large Language Models: Language Understanding and Generation, authored by AI bloggers and visual-education experts Jay Alammar and Maarten Grootendorst. Published by O’Reilly Media in October 2024, this 425‑page paperback delivers an intuitive, hands-on learning experience designed to both inform and inspire.

Through a visual-first approach, readers explore:

Transformer models’ inner workings—from embeddings and attention to generation and representation

Construction of LLM pipelines for text clustering, topic modeling, and semantic search

Prompt engineering and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques

Fine-tuning strategies—including generative, contrastive, and in-context learning methods

Each chapter blends insightful diagrams with runnable Python examples, accessible via Google Colab, enabling you to practice concepts directly in a coding environment. With clear learning curves and real-world use cases, the book transitions from core concepts to advanced topics, building confidence along the way.

Ideal for practitioners—developers, data scientists, or thoughtful AI users—this book bridges theory, visuals, and code to demystify LLMs. As one reviewer noted, “the transformer attention mechanisms, paired with intuitive diagrams, made an otherwise abstract topic remarkably easy to grasp”