Book 8

APIs, LLMs & AI

HTTP APIs, language models, tokens, and context — for hosting teams

Free · Digital Textbook

Bridge from infrastructure to modern AI: REST APIs, how LLMs work, tokens, context windows, prompts, and running AI responsibly on Canadian infrastructure.

  • 9 chapters
  • ~3 hours
  • Hands-on exercises in every chapter
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Table of Contents

Chapters

Read in order the first time — later chapters reference the lab company introduced in Chapter 1.

  1. 01 Welcome to Book 8 From servers to APIs and AI — why hosting teams need this now. 10 min
  2. 02 What Is an API? HTTP, JSON, endpoints, auth keys — the vocabulary. 25 min
  3. 03 APIs for Infrastructure Teams DNS, cloud, webhooks, and automation without clicking panels. 28 min
  4. 04 What Are LLMs? Predictive text at scale — models, training, inference. 30 min
  5. 05 Tokens & Tokenization How text becomes numbers, pricing, and counting tokens. 28 min
  6. 06 Context Length & Memory Context windows, truncation, RAG, and staying within limits. 30 min
  7. 07 Prompts & System Messages Roles, instructions, few-shot examples, guardrails. 25 min
  8. 08 AI on Your Infrastructure Self-hosted vs cloud API, privacy, Canadian data paths. 28 min
  9. 09 Capstone: Workshop Co. AI Plan FAQ bot scope, API choice, token budget, hosting decision. 40 min