ManningBooks

ManningBooks

Devtalk Sponsor

Context Engineering (Manning)

Context engineering is the discipline of selecting, organizing, updating, compressing, prioritizing the precise context a model needs to generate accurate responses. This book shows you how to combine well-designed prompts with smart search, content filtering, and advanced RAG techniques incorporating many types of stored data to create reliable responses in your AI applications.

Boni Garcia

If you’re building with LLMs, you’ve probably run into the same pattern many teams are seeing: a clever prompt works in a demo, then falls apart when the system has to handle fresh data, long conversations, tools, memory, multiple steps, or production constraints. The missing piece is often context: what the model sees, when it sees it, how that context is selected, and what gets left out.

Context Engineering treats that as a software design problem.

The book shows how to build AI systems where the model’s information environment is designed with the same care as the code around it. Boni García covers the full context stack: instructions, external knowledge, tools, memory, state, user prompts, orchestration, evaluation, observability, and governance.

Early chapters are already available and cover:

  • What context engineering is and why prompt engineering is only one part of the picture

  • How LLM-based systems evolve from single model calls to workflows, agents, and agentic systems

  • System prompts, agent skills, and instruction artifacts such as AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md

  • RAG pipelines, chunking, vector databases, graph RAG, hybrid RAG, agentic RAG, vectorless RAG, cache-augmented generation, and context stuffing

  • Tool use through function calling, command-line interfaces, and the Model Context Protocol

The hands-on sections use current tools and platforms, including OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, Ollama, LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, DSPy, RAGFlow, and MCP servers. Examples are grounded in working code, with a companion GitHub repository for readers who want to follow along.

This book is aimed at AI engineers, data scientists, and engineering managers who already know the basics of LLMs and agents and want to build systems that behave more consistently outside a notebook or prototype.

A bit about the author: Boni García is an Associate Professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, a Selenium project tech lead, and the creator and maintainer of WebDriverManager and Selenium Manager. His work sits at the intersection of software engineering, test automation, and applied AI.

MEAP means you can start reading now while the book is still being completed. You’ll get updates as new chapters are added.

If you’re working on RAG, agents, coding assistants, enterprise copilots, or any LLM system where “just make the prompt better” has stopped being enough, this one should be on your list.


Don’t forget you can get 45% off with your Devtalk discount! Just use the coupon code “devtalk.com” at checkout :+1:

First Post!

KnowledgeIsPower

KnowledgeIsPower

Looks like a very good book.

I just tried to implement a POC on RAG / chatbot without much domain knowledge on it.

Where Next?

Popular Ai topics Top

ManningBooks
Based on Ilya Sutskever’s famous “must-read” list of ~30 AI papers, this book walks you through the research that shaped today’s deep lea...
New
ManningBooks
Grokking AI Algorithms, Second Edition introduces the most important AI algorithms using relatable illustrations, interesting examples, a...
New
ManningBooks
Erlang and OTP in Action teaches you the concepts of concurrent programming and the use of Erlang’s message-passing model. It walks you t...
New
pragdave
Build a prototype in a weekend or a full product in a month or two. Untangle legacy systems, improve tests and documentation, and tackle ...
New
ManningBooks
CUDA for Deep Learning shows you how to work within the CUDA ecosystem, from your first kernel to implementing advanced LLM features like...
New
ManningBooks
Introduction to Generative AI, Second Edition, guides you from your first eye-opening interaction with tools like ChatGPT to how AI tools...
New
ManningBooks
Build AI-Enhanced Web Apps guides you through AI development using only JavaScript and other common web dev skills–no Python or Machine L...
New
ManningBooks
Context engineering is the discipline of selecting, organizing, updating, compressing, prioritizing the precise context a model needs to ...
New
ManningBooks
LLM Customization and Fine-Tuning is a hands-on playbook for turning a general-purpose open-weights model into a focused, cost-efficient ...
New
ManningBooks
General-purpose models are impressive, but they aren’t always the right fit for domain-specific or mission-critical applications. Prompt ...
New

Other popular topics Top

PragmaticBookshelf
Machine learning can be intimidating, with its reliance on math and algorithms that most programmers don't encounter in their regular wor...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Brace yourself for a fun challenge: build a photorealistic 3D renderer from scratch! In just a couple of weeks, build a ray tracer that r...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Write Elixir tests that you can be proud of. Dive into Elixir’s test philosophy and gain mastery over the terminology and concepts that u...
New
AstonJ
poll poll Be sure to check out @Dusty’s article posted here: An Introduction to Alternative Keyboard Layouts It’s one of the best write-...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
From finance to artificial intelligence, genetic algorithms are a powerful tool with a wide array of applications. But you don't need an ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Learn different ways of writing concurrent code in Elixir and increase your application's performance, without sacrificing scalability or...
New
Maartz
Hi folks, I don’t know if I saw this here but, here’s a new programming language, called Roc Reminds me a bit of Elm and thus Haskell. ...
New
Fl4m3Ph03n1x
Background Lately I am in a quest to find a good quality TTS ai generation tool to run locally in order to create audio for some videos I...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Lint your docs like code: turn any style guide into enforceable rules with Vale and publish clear, consistent content every time. ...
New
xiji2646-netizen
Woke up to this today: Claude Code’s complete source code exposed via npm source map. Not a snippet. All 512,000 lines. 1,900 TypeScript ...
New