The Alt-Ac Job Beat Newsletter Post 24 (new book out on LLMs)

Hi Everyone,

I know the newsletter has been archived for a bit now, but wanted to share with the group my new book out, Large Language Models for Mortals: A Practical Guide for Analysts.

The reason I started the newsletter was to help folks with backgrounds in social science and crime analysis develop the skills to compete in the private sector job market. I now run a team of close to 10 folks at Gainwell, and I would love to hire more individuals with PhDs, but many lack the requisite skills.

I focused for a bit on learning python (hence book #1), and there are many online tutorials on learning traditional machine learning. ChatGPT has changed quite a bit of the data science landscape though, and now knowing large language models is becoming a much more important skill than traditional supervised machine learning. And those jobs are just going to continue to grow.

Most of these roles are focusing on using the LLM APIs (not building your own models), so I wrote this book for beginners to get up to speed with the basics of APIs, and then get your feet wet with major design patterns (structured outputs, RAG, and tool-calling/agents). It also includes a chapter demonstrating different coding tools (Copilot, Claude Code, and Antigravity). So even if you have a traditional analyst/machine learning role, it will be important to have experience using those tools to help you write code.

Folks on the newsletter can use the promo code LLMDEVS to get 50% off of the epub. Same as the python book, it is available for purchase worldwide in paperback or epub.

Thank you, Andy