Front Matter

Course Syllabi: University Programs

How to Use This Section

This section provides four complete 14-week university syllabi. Instructors can adopt a syllabus directly or mix elements from multiple courses. All syllabi assume a 3-hour weekly session (lecture plus lab). Self-directed learners looking for goal-based paths should see FM.2: Reading Pathways instead.

University Course Syllabi

With 39 chapters, no single semester can cover everything. The following four syllabi are designed for instructors adopting this book for a single-semester (14-week) university course. Click any card for the complete week-by-week syllabus with hyperlinked chapter references.

Undergraduate Engineering

Audience B.Sc. CS / Software Engineering
Duration 14 weeks, 3 hrs/wk
Focus NLP foundations, transformers, APIs, RAG, agents

Undergraduate Research

Audience B.Sc. students, strong math background
Duration 14 weeks, 3 hrs/wk
Focus Transformer internals, scaling laws, interpretability, alignment

Graduate Engineering

Audience M.Sc. / M.Eng. production AI
Duration 14 weeks, 3 hrs/wk
Focus Fine-tuning, RAG, multi-agent, eval, observability, deployment

Graduate Research

Audience M.Sc. / Ph.D. LLM theory and frontiers
Duration 14 weeks, 3 hrs/wk (lecture + seminar)
Focus Training dynamics, RLHF/DPO, interpretability, scaling, safety

Self-Study Tracks

These five focused tracks are designed for self-directed learners who want to go deep in a specific area. Each track provides a curated sequence of chapters and sections, ordered for maximum coherence. Click any card for the complete learning sequence with hyperlinked chapter references.

Data Engineering Track

Focus Data pipelines, embeddings, and vector databases

Agent Builder Track

Focus Building AI agents and multi-agent systems

Researcher Track

Focus Understanding architectures and advancing the field

MLOps / Production Track

Focus Deploying, monitoring, and scaling LLM systems

Domain Specialist Track

Focus Applying LLMs to specific industry domains

What Comes Next

Now that you have a syllabus in mind, proceed to FM.6: How This Book Was Created to learn about the AI-assisted production process, or jump directly to Chapter 00 to begin reading.