AI APIs in Practice

About this book

AI APIs in Practice is a visual engineering guide to building with text, tool, retrieval, voice, video, and multimodal AI APIs. It breaks an API call into endpoint, authentication, payload, limits, request identity, and destination, then connects those mechanics to agents, RAG, evaluation, observability, governance, and production products. Security is treated as part of product design: secrets stay server-side, leaked credentials are rotated, least privilege and spend limits are applied, and payloads keep instructions, user data, constraints, and metadata clearly separated.

What you will learn

• Understand the roles of text, media, tool, retrieval, voice, and video APIs in an AI product.
• Design reliable API requests with explicit endpoints, authentication, payloads, limits, and request IDs.
• Protect API keys with server-side secret handling, rotation, least privilege, and environment separation.
• Separate instructions, user data, constraints, and metadata for clearer model behavior.
• Connect API mechanics to agents, RAG, evaluation, monitoring, audit, and real-world product design.

Key topics

• AI APIs
• Multimodal AI
• Agents
• RAG and retrieval
• API authentication
• Payload design
• Evaluation and observability
• Governance and security

Who this book is for

For software engineers, AI builders, product developers, and technical learners building production-oriented AI systems.