I have been working on this one for a while, so it feels good to finally say it: AI Coding for Makers and Solopreneurs is published, and you can get the ebook right now from Tech Explorations.
If you have taken the video course, you already know the material. So let me tell you what the book is, and why I think it is worth having alongside the course, or instead of it, depending on how you learn.
I built the course for people who learn by watching and doing, and I wrote the book for people who learn by reading and thinking. Most of us are a bit of both, and the two formats complement each other. When When I am watching a video, I follow along. When I am reading, I go at my own pace, jump back to re-read a section, annotate the margin, or pick up from where I left off on a commute. The book gives you a version of this material that you can do all of that with.
There is also content in the book that I do not cover in the same depth in the course. Writing the manuscript forced me to be more precise about the reasoning behind certain decisions, things that are easy to wave past in a video but that deserve a proper explanation when someone is reading carefully. The chapter on failure modes is tighter. The section on multi-user application design is more thorough. A few ideas that I cover briefly in the course get a full treatment in the book because I had space to work them out properly.
The book follows the same four-project arc as the course. You build a browser-based RC filter analyser, then a serial data plotter, then a datasheet Q&A tool that has a language model running inside the application itself, and finally a multi-user resource booking system with a database, background jobs, and external API integrations. Each project is the worked example for the concepts in that part of the book. The concepts are taught because they make the next build step clearer, not as background reading before the real work begins.
What the book adds to this arc is a pace you control entirely. If the datasheet Q&A chapter is the one that matters most to your project right now, you can go there directly, read slowly, and come back to the earlier material whenever you want. You can also read the book without a screen in front of you, which is something I find genuinely useful when I am trying to think through an approach rather than just follow one.
If you have not taken the course and are wondering whether the book is a good place to start, the answer is yes. The book stands on its own. It assumes you are comfortable with a microcontroller and have written some Python, but it does not assume you have used an AI coding assistant before or built a production application before. It starts from first principles and builds up from there.
A print edition is also in the works, through Elektor. The manuscript is with them now. I will post here when a release date is confirmed.
For now, the ebook is ready.
You can find more details, including the full table of contents and sample chapters, in the book page. You can purchase it here.