AI Agents — Appendices

Preface

These are the appendices to AI Agents: Designing, Orchestrating, and Governing LLM-Based Systems by Michael Bücker and Michael Hewing.

They are published here rather than in the printed book, so that the parts that age fastest, the setup steps, the package versions, and the provider-specific API details, can be corrected while the edition is in use.

Appendix A, Python Setup is the one to read first if you want to run the book’s code. It covers installing Python and uv, the project’s dependencies, environment variables and API keys, and running a first example.

Appendix B, Python and API basics is a reference rather than a full course: enough Python to read, run, and adapt the book’s listings, and enough about web APIs and JSON to follow the tool-calling, retrieval, and orchestration examples that depend on them.

Appendix C, Deep learning sits one level below the models chapter, covering the vector and matrix operations, network structure, and training dynamics that the book uses without pausing to define.

The runnable code from the book, one notebook per chapter, is at https://github.com/ai-agents-book/code.