AI APIs in Practice

AI APIs in Practice is a visual engineering guide to designing, building, evaluating, securing, and commercializing modern artificial intelligence applications through APIs.

The book moves beyond isolated prompts and experimental demonstrations to explain how reliable, observable, governed, and production-ready AI systems are constructed. Through richly designed infographics, architecture maps, code-oriented examples, engineering workflows, and real-world product blueprints, complex AI concepts are transformed into clear and practical visual knowledge.

The book covers AI API architecture, request and response design, authentication, API key security, structured outputs, JSON Schema, prompt engineering, context-window management, model selection, model routing, streaming, WebSockets, WebRTC, asynchronous jobs, webhooks, batch processing, tool use, Model Context Protocol, retrieval-augmented generation, vector search, document and PDF understanding, multimodal AI, image APIs, speech APIs, video APIs, intelligent agents, evaluation, observability, privacy, safety, governance, cost control, human approval, and production deployment.

Readers will learn how to connect language models with tools, documents, databases, images, audio, video, external knowledge sources, and business workflows. The book also explains how to evaluate quality, groundedness, latency, reliability, security, and cost before transforming an AI prototype into a trusted real-world product.

AI APIs in Practice is designed for software engineers, AI engineers, machine-learning professionals, data engineers, researchers, educators, technical leaders, startup founders, product builders, and advanced students seeking a practical systems-engineering perspective on applied artificial intelligence.

Companion source code and technical resources are freely available at:
https://faramarzkowsari.github.io/ai-api-playbook/

Author:
Faramarz Kowsari

First Edition, 2026