Prompt Engineering Concepts

This course teaches absolute beginners to get dramatically better results from AI, built on the premise that prompting is clear communication, not coding. Its spine is a single memorable framework — R-C-T-F (Role, Context, Task, Format) — introduced early and reinforced through every technique, exercise, and the capstone. It layers five core techniques one at a time: be specific (use numbers), show examples (few-shot), think step by step (chain-of-thought), iterate, and set constraints/guardrails, with hallucination-avoidance and data-safety woven throughout. Practical sections cover where prompting shows up by role, the tool landscape, best practices, daily tricks, and common mistakes. It closes hands-on with two quizzes, four exercises, a capstone project — a personal Prompt Playbook of five reusable templates for the learner's own job — and a printable Six Golden Rules job aid, with next steps pointing to the MCP and AI Agents courses.