Books
Books by Alex Merced on data, AI, and code
Books on the software and agent infrastructure covered here: building agents, shipping AI systems, and working well with AI tooling day to day.
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AI and Agents for Normal People
A practical guide to using AI tools for everyday tasks, covering Gemini, NotebookLM, ChatGPT, Claude, and local agent workflows without technical jargon.
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AI Application Architecture: Patterns for Building Intelligent Systems
Covers architectural patterns for building intelligent applications, from inference pipelines to multi-agent orchestration.
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Apache Iceberg for Agentic AI: Connecting Structured Enterprise
Explores how to connect structured enterprise data in Apache Iceberg lakehouses to agentic AI systems.
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Being Productive with Open Models
A practical guide to using open models with Opencode, PI, and Hermes for AI-assisted development.
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Building Knowledge Systems for AI: Graphs, RAG, Memory, and Context
A deep dive into building robust knowledge systems for AI using knowledge graphs, RAG, memory architectures, and context management.
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Constructing Context and Semantics for AI Agents
A practical guide to embeddings, knowledge graphs, memory systems, RAG, evaluation, and production agent architectures.
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Enabling Agentic Analytics with Apache Iceberg and Dremio
A practical guide to building AI-ready lakehouse systems using Apache Iceberg and Dremio for agentic analytics workflows.
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Evaluating AI Systems: Testing LLMs, RAG, and Agents
A guide to properly testing and evaluating AI systems, including benchmarking strategies for LLMs, RAG pipelines, and agents.
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Governing AI Systems
A guide to AI governance frameworks, covering risk management, compliance, ethics, and organizational oversight of AI systems.
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Hands-On Agentic Engineering: A Practical Guide to Building Multi-Agent Systems
A practical guide to building multi-agent systems with Apache Iceberg.
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The 2026 Guide to Lakehouses, Apache Iceberg and Agentic AI
A comprehensive guide covering the convergence of lakehouse architecture, Apache Iceberg, and the rise of agentic AI systems.
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The Agentic Enterprise: Deploying AI Agents Across the Modern Organization
A guide to deploying AI agents across enterprise functions, covering strategy, governance, and organizational adoption.
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The AI Lakehouse: Architecting Data Platforms for AI
Explores how to architect data lakehouse platforms specifically designed to serve AI and machine learning workloads.
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The Book on Agentic Analytics
Explores the foundations of agentic data architecture, where AI agents autonomously discover, query, and analyze data.
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The Book on Data, Data Engineering, Data Analytics, and Agentic AI - Volume 1
A complete guide to modern data systems, data engineering, analytics, and AI.
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The Book on Data, Data Engineering, Data Analytics, and Agentic AI - Volume 2
A complete guide to SQL analytics, BI, and agentic AI for modern data platforms.
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The No Lock-in Apache Iceberg Lakehouse with Agentic Analytics
A practical guide to building a portable Apache Iceberg lakehouse with open catalogs, agentic analytics, and AI-ready data platforms while avoiding vendor lock-in.
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Using AI Agents for Data Engineering and Data Analysis
A practical guide to leveraging AI agents for automating data engineering pipelines and performing intelligent data analysis.
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Building the Software Factory
Packt Publishing
Co-authored with Benedikt Stemmildt. How to turn AI coding agents into a dependable, team-wide software factory using context engineering, AI-TDD, harness design, and the AEMM and Elastic Loop frameworks, moving teams from vibe coding to disciplined agentic engineering.
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AI-Ready Data
Designing data platforms optimized for LLMs, AI agents, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflows.
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Shipping AI: From Prototype to Production Systems
Covers the full lifecycle of taking AI systems from prototype to production, including deployment, scaling, and monitoring.
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The 2026 Guide to AI-Assisted Development
Covers prompt engineering, AI coding assistants, and agent-driven development workflows for modern software engineers.
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The AI Engineering Handbook
A full-stack reference for building AI systems, covering LLMs, embeddings, agents, RAG, and production deployment patterns.
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The Economics of AI: Cost, Latency, and Infrastructure Tradeoffs
Analyzes the cost structures of AI systems and how to optimize spending across compute, latency, and infrastructure.
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The Economics of Labor in the AI Era
Examines how the AI era is disrupting the labor market and explores paths for adaptation and the future of work.
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Being Productive with Claude
A practical guide to Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Dispatch for AI-powered development.
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Being Productive with Google AI
A practical guide to using Google's AI ecosystem including Gemini, NotebookLM, Veo, Gemini Spark, and Jules.
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Being Productive with Grok and Cursor
A practical guide to the xAI and Cursor coding ecosystem covering Grok Chat, Grok Build, DeepSearch, Cursor Composer, Agent Mode, MCP servers, and local model runtimes for agentic development workflows.
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Being Productive with Microsoft Copilot
A practical guide to the Microsoft Copilot ecosystem covering Copilot Chat, M365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot Agent Mode, Copilot Studio, Copilot Cowork, and Copilot Plus PC features.
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Being Productive with OpenAI Codex
A practical guide to building documents, images, video, websites, and apps with an AI agent using OpenAI Codex.
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Reputation as Code
The companion book to branding.alexmerced.com, covering personal branding, reputation engineering, and career sovereignty for developers and tech professionals.
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Alex Merced's Field Guide to Developer Relations
A practical guide to developer relations, community building, and technical evangelism for practitioners entering or growing in the DevRel field.
