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AI & Machine Learning Beginner

AI for Developers: A Practical First Month with LLM APIs

Your first month with model APIs: keys, streaming, retries, cost and one shipped feature.

Rated 4.5 out of 5 from 2 reviews 26 students

PR Created by Priya Raman

  • Last updated August 2026
  • English
  • 3h 25m of material
  • 26 lessons

What you will learn

7 concrete outcomes

Every bullet below is something you will have built, shipped or be able to explain by the time you finish the last lesson.

  • Set up API access safely with environment variables and spend limits
  • Understand messages, roles, temperature, token limits and stop sequences
  • Stream a response so the interface feels responsive rather than frozen
  • Retry with backoff and survive rate limits without crashing
  • Calculate cost per request accurately and reduce it with caching
  • Log requests so a strange answer can be investigated the next day
  • Ship one complete feature, including its queue and error path

Course curriculum

5 modules · 26 lessons · 3h 25m of material

5 lessons running 38m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

5 lessons running 42m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

6 lessons running 46m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

5 lessons running 40m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

5 lessons running 39m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

5 modules · 26 lessons

3h 25m total length

Requirements

Short list, and deliberately so. If you meet these you can start today.

  • You can write basic Python or JavaScript
  • Comfortable using a terminal and installing packages
  • A model API account, free credits are sufficient for the whole course

About this course

If you can write a web request, you can build with language models. What stops most developers is not difficulty, it is the fog of unfamiliar words and the quiet fear of an unexpected bill. This course clears both in an afternoon of focused work.

You set up API access properly from the first lesson, with keys in environment variables, a client wrapper you control, and spend limits configured before you send anything. Then you learn the request shape itself: messages and roles, the system instruction, temperature and maximum tokens, stop sequences, and how a response is actually structured when it arrives.

From there it is engineering. Streaming a response to a user so the interface feels alive, retrying with backoff when a request fails, handling rate limits without a crash, timing out cleanly, and logging enough to debug tomorrow. You calculate cost per request by hand until the arithmetic is second nature, then add a simple cache and watch the number fall.

The last third is a real feature built end to end: a document summariser with a queue, a status page and a proper error path. It is small on purpose, because the aim is a thing you have actually finished rather than a demo you have abandoned. Everything runs in Python, with a JavaScript version of each exercise included.

Topics covered

Frequently asked questions

Still unsure about something? Write to misteryjj100@gmail.com and a human answers, usually the same working day.

Around two dollars of usage across the whole course on current pricing, and the setup lesson configures a hard spend limit before you send a single request.

Lessons are recorded in Python. Every exercise ships with a JavaScript equivalent in the downloads, so you can follow in either language.

Only the minimum needed to ship. Prompting has its own dedicated courses; this one is about the API, the plumbing and the cost.

Checkout is handled on our provider's secure payment page. The moment your payment clears we email your personal access link and access code to the address you used at checkout, and the same link appears in your account library. There is nothing to install and nothing to wait for.

Email misteryjj100@gmail.com within 14 days of your purchase, quote your order number, and we refund the full amount to your original payment method. No form to fill in and no questions about how much of the course you watched.

What students say

Reviews are written by people who bought this course. We publish the critical ones too.

4.5

Rated 4.5 out of 5

Course rating · 2 reviews

Rating distribution

  • 5 stars 50%
  • 4 stars 50%
  • 3 stars 0%
  • 2 stars 0%
  • 1 star 0%
  • GL

    Gustavo Lima

    Engineering manager

    Apr 2026
    Rated 5.0 out of 5

    The cost chapter should come first

    Working out what a feature will cost per thousand users before you build it is not something anybody taught me. Ten minutes of multiplication in this course has already stopped me building something I could not have defended in a budget meeting.
  • MF

    Mia Fontaine

    Web developer

    Jan 2026
    Rated 4.0 out of 5

    Ends slightly early

    Everything through streaming and retry handling is pitched exactly right for a beginner, and building your own thin client rather than reaching for a framework was the correct decision. The feature you ship at the end is quite small though, and I would have taken one more chapter on it over anything else.

Your instructor

PR

Priya Raman

Applied AI and machine-learning engineer

  • 236 students taught
  • 13 courses published
  • 4.3 instructor rating
  • Machine learning
  • RAG
  • Fine-tuning
  • LLM agents

Priya builds language-model features for a document-heavy SaaS product, which means she has taken retrieval and fine-tuning from a promising notebook to something on call at three in the morning. She teaches the mathematics only where it changes a decision you are about to make, and spends the rest of the time on data quality, evaluation and the cost of an agent that loops. Her courses run on a laptop and a modest API budget, so nobody has to rent a cluster to follow along. She publishes reproducible notebooks alongside every module.

See every course by Priya Raman
$19 USD

One-time payment · lifetime access

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