OpenAI Cookbook: A Practical Path for AI Application Developers

Topics covered

• •Understand how the Chat/Responses API works: message roles, parameters, response format.
• •Learn to count tokens and estimate request costs before sending them.
• •Master streaming responses and Structured Outputs.

Topics covered

• •Understand what vector text representations are and why they "understand meaning."
• •Learn to get embeddings via the API and compare texts using cosine similarity.
• •Apply embeddings to four classes of tasks: search, classification, clustering, recommendations.

Topics covered

• •Understand the RAG architecture and when it's needed instead of fine-tuning or a long context.
• •Build the full pipeline: document preparation → chunking → indexing → retrieval → generation.
• •Master parsing "messy" sources (PDFs) and managed File Search in the Responses API.

Topics covered

• •Understand the function calling mechanism: how the model "calls" your code and what actually happens.
• •Learn to describe tools with JSON schemas and build a tool-use loop.
• •Master agent patterns: the "think → tool → result" loop, handoffs between agents, parallelism.

Topics covered

• •Master image generation and editing (GPT Image, DALL·E).
• •Learn to "read" images with vision models: captioning, tagging, data extraction.
• •Understand the technique of analyzing video via frame sampling.

Topics covered

• •Understand when fine-tuning is justified, and when prompting or RAG is enough.
• •Master preparing and validating training data in chat format.
• •Go through the full cycle: uploading data → running a job → monitoring → using the model.

Topics covered

• •Understand why systematic evaluations (evals) are needed and how to build them.
• •Master LLM-as-a-Judge: when a model can evaluate a model, and how to trust that judge.
• •Learn to build guardrails: input and output checks, protection against hallucinations.

Topics covered

• •Learn to work reliably under rate limits: retries, backoff, parallelization.
• •Master prompt caching and structuring prompts for the cache.
• •Use the Batch API for offline tasks at a 50% discount.