To get the most out of this book

In order to learn from this book, you should have a basic knowledge of Python, minimal experience at the beginner level in machine learning, and some hands-on experience in generative AI. You need to have a Google Cloud project with enabled Vertex AI APIs. For most of the examples provided in this book, your costs will be minimal (less than a few dozen dollars). The only expensive workload is developing your own RAG on a massive amount of PDFs using Vertex Agent Builder and Vertex Vector Search, but you can skip those examples if you don’t need the scale Google Cloud provides for these use cases.

We also encourage you to register and get an API key on LangSmith (but the free tier would be enough for running through this book).

Software/hardware covered in the book	Operating system requirements
Python with the required libraries installed	Windows, macOS, or Linux and ChromeOS
Vertex AI API on Google Cloud
A custom Google Search enabled and a Google Cloud API key
Vertex Vector Search, Vertex Agent Builder
LangSmith (free tier)

We encourage you to create a Python virtual environment (using Python venv or conda) and install all the dependencies in your virtual environment with pip or conda install.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.