I’ve Read 20+ Books on AI and LLM — Here Are My Top 5 Recommendations for 2026

A curated list of five essential books for learning AI and LLM engineering, covering practical topics from building and fine-tuning models to production deployment. The recommendations include hands-on guides for prompt optimization, retrieval-augmented generation, model evaluation, infrastructure design, and understanding transformer architectures from scratch. Each book emphasizes production-ready engineering practices including monitoring, cost optimization, and system design rather than pure theory.