Best first stop for plain-English AI basics: LLM Fundamentals. Matt Pocock's beginner tutorial on tokens, context windows, tools, and agents. Use it before choosing a specialty because it explains the vocabulary people keep assuming you already know.
Best non-technical business foundation: Generative AI for Everyone. DeepLearning.AI course by Andrew Ng for general AI literacy. Use it if you need to understand what generative AI can and cannot do before touching APIs or frameworks.
Best broad prompting reference: Learn Prompting. Sander Schulhoff's structured guide to prompting concepts and safety. Use it as a reference once you start writing prompts for real tasks.
Start with vocabulary, not tool shopping
A beginner does not need twenty AI newsletters or a list of every new model. The first job is to understand the recurring vocabulary: tokens, context windows, prompting, tools, retrieval, agents, model limits, and evaluation. Once those ideas are clear, the rest of the field becomes easier to sort.
LLM Fundamentals is a good first stop because it explains the words you will see everywhere else. Generative AI for Everyone is useful if you need the business and social picture before touching code. Learn Prompting becomes more useful after that, when you have real tasks to practice on.
What beginners should postpone
Do not start with fine-tuning, model internals, or autonomous agents unless you already have the basics. Those topics are worthwhile later, but they create confusion if you cannot yet explain what a prompt, context window, tool call, or grounded answer is.
A good beginner path should leave you able to use AI for one real workflow, judge when the answer is unreliable, and know which deeper topic to study next. That is more useful than collecting disconnected AI hacks.
Recommended courses and resources
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ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers
Short course · DeepLearning.AI · Beginner
You want a short, structured intro to prompting for software tasks.
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Microsoft AI Agents for Beginners
GitHub repo · Microsoft · Beginner to intermediate
You want a structured agent learning path with code.
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Learn Prompting
Guide · Sander Schulhoff · Beginner to intermediate
You need a broad prompt engineering reference.
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Prompt Engineering Guide
Guide · DAIR.AI · Beginner to advanced
You want examples of prompting techniques and patterns.
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GPT-5.5 prompting guide
Guide · OpenAI · Intermediate
You want the official prompting adjustments for GPT-5.5 instead of reusing older GPT-4 or GPT-5 prompt habits unchanged.
