FRONT COVER MATTER

HOW TO USE THE PRACTICE LAB Reading is useful, but skill comes from doing. For that reason this book includes a Practice Lab, which is a single hands-on project that you build in small steps across the book. The project is called the Resume Review Agent. A resume is a short document in which a job seeker lists their experience and skills. The Resume Review Agent is a small AI agent that reads resumes along with a job posting, thinks about how well each resume matches the job, and writes a short review. This is a safe and familiar project, because most people understand what a resume and a job posting are. You will build the Resume Review Agent mainly in Part Sixteen, in Chapters 65 through 69, and the complete lab instructions and file listings are collected in Appendix G. You may wonder why the lab appears in the early chapters when it is built later. The reason is that every chapter ends with a section called Practice Lab Connection. In the early chapters, that section tells you what to look for in the finished lab, so that you can come back to it and practice. In later chapters, you will build the matching piece of the lab as you go. Here is a simple way to use the lab. 1. Read the chapter first. 2. Do the Check Your Understanding questions. 3. Copy one of the Artificial Intelligence Assistant Prompts into an AI assistant. 4. Replace the bracketed placeholders with real material from the lab, such as a run log or a source file. 5. Read the assistant's answer critically, compare it with what the chapter taught you, and decide what to keep. If you have not built the lab yet, you can still use the prompts with any small example of your own, or with a sample the chapter describes. The prompts are written to resemble real on-the-job requests, so practicing them also builds the habit of working alongside an AI assistant as a professional tool. One caution applies throughout. An AI assistant is a helper, not an authority. It may state wrong things with confidence. You are the engineer, and you remain responsible for checking its work.