About the Book
The Agentic AI Book is the definitive guide for anyone serious about understanding the core components of AI agents and building ones that actually work in the real world. Written by an active AI professor and industry advisor, this framework bridges the gap between academic theory and production-ready reality.
While others show you how to build agents in low-code environments and hope for the best, this book is for engineers who want to leave the 'prompt-and-pray' era behind. You'll understand the cognitive architecture driving agent behavior, and learn to diagnose hallucinations, prevent prompt injections, and architect systems that survive contact with the chaos of non-deterministic environments.
What Sets This Book Apart
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Visual Blueprints for Complex Logic.
Features over 120 original, custom-built figures (60 in the first three chapters alone). I've mapped out the complex architectures visually so you don't have to reverse-engineer dense academic papers to understand what’s actually happening under the hood. -
Foundation First, Problems Second, Solutions Third.
Traces AI from n-grams to transformers, from rule-based systems to emergent intelligence. Each chapter builds from first principles—you'll understand not just what works, but why. -
Beyond the Hype Cycle.
AI moves fast, but the foundational mechanics—attention mechanisms, multi-agent coordination, RAG—are bedrock. We focus on the concepts that will still matter five years from now. We're studying the physics, not the weather. No AGI promises—just practical patterns that work today.
Who This Book Is For
Whether you're a technical leader evaluating AI strategies, an engineering manager building agent teams, a software developer transitioning to AI, a data scientist expanding beyond models, or a machine learning engineer ready to deploy autonomous systems—this book gives you both the foundational understanding and practical tools to succeed.
Perfect for those new to AI who want deep understanding, and invaluable for experienced practitioners who need production-grade solutions.
What AI Leaders Say
"Dr. Rad’s deep dive into the architectural evolution from manual feature engineering to the representational revolution of deep learning is essential reading. He moves past surface-level tutorials to explain the fundamental shift from hard logic to 'learned intuition'. This book provides the technical substrate needed to move beyond simple 'prompt-and-pray' methods to the D2D reality of production-ready agentic systems."
"Finally, a resource that respects the reader's intelligence. Ryan cuts through the noise of the current AI hype cycle with surgical precision. He provides a coherent mental model that finally eliminates the confusion caused by overlapping AI terminology. His explanation of the 'VLM Trick'—efficiently connecting pre-trained vision encoders to LLMs—is the most practical guide available for building agents that can truly perceive and interact with the visual world."
Buy the Book
Chapters
Full Completion: June 2026
The demand for a comprehensive, practical guide to agentic AI is now. I'm releasing this book incrementally so you can start reading immediately. Chapters 1-3 (55% of the book) are available now exclusively for Founding Members.
- Chapter 1: The AI Landscape (Done ✔)
- Chapter 2: Language Models and Multimodal Intelligence (Done ✔)
- Chapter 3: Building with Large Language Models (Done ✔)
- Chapter 4: Agent Building Blocks (Mid April)
- Chapter 5: Multi-Agent Architectures and Design Patterns (Mid May)
- Chapter 6: Production-Ready Agentic AI (Mid June)
This book follows a Community-First publishing model. Founding Members receive new chapters as they're written, plus the final edition in July at no extra cost.
About the Author
Dr. Ryan Rad is an AI researcher, professor, and industry advisor with over 15 years shaping how artificial intelligence is built, taught, and deployed. He holds faculty positions at Northeastern University and the University of British Columbia, where he has designed curricula and graduate programs in Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Generative AI, and Data Science—reaching thousands of students across six universities and online. His industry work spans research, engineering, and leadership at startups and tech giants including Microsoft, scaling AI solutions across 40 countries for Fortune 500 companies.
A sought-after speaker with 50+ international talks and tens of top-tier peer-reviewed publications, Dr. Rad's research focuses on resource-efficient generative AI for edge deployment. He is the author of The Agentic AI Book—distilling years of building, teaching, and deploying AI into actionable insights—and shares AI perspectives on his YouTube channel.
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