In a bit of surreal news, I'm happy to announce that with the imminent publishing of "What Are AI Agents? When and How to Use LLM Agents" I will officially be an O'Reilly author. To say it is meaningful to me to write for O'Reilly doesn't quite capture it. Without O'Reilly authors or the editors who gave those authors a chance, I wouldn't have the career I do today.

After college, the only job could manage to get was one pulling weeds. Every day after work, I would return to my parent's house sweaty, covered in dirt and ticks, and I'd spend my time doing one of two things: applying to jobs or reading O'Reilly books. I believed then what I believe now: that education is a key to prosperity.

Like so many others, my first O'Reilly book was R for Data Science by Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund. To this day, I believe it to be one of the best introductions to data analytics. At the time I couldn't afford to buy these vaunted animal books, but this was no matter. My local library had many O'Reilly books to loan. I remember borrowing my mom's car every week to go to the library after work. Often I'd simply walk the aisles of computer science books, scanning their spines for that signature red-and-white, adding ever-more titles to my internal to-read list. The time I spent reading those books were some of the most valuable investments I've made in my career.

So yes, it's utterly meaningful to me that in my own small way, I too would contribute to the O'Reilly collection. I think of "What Are AI Agents?" less as a book and more as a pamphlet for those individuals like me who were first getting into machine learning and data science all those years ago—it's also a great fit for anyone who simply wants to understand at a high level what AI Agents are! I'll be sure to write more about the contents of "What Are AI Agents?" when it comes out, but for now I will simply say this: I'm so grateful to have been able to write for O'Reilly. If I can play even a small role in a reader's career development like others did for me, I will be deeply grateful.

"What Are AI Agents" should be out within the month! I'll be sure to post again with an update.