Best Prompt Engineering Resources (2026 Edition)
A curated list of the best prompt engineering books, papers, tools, and courses
I’ve been researching, learning, and regularly sharing prompt engineering resources for the past 2+ years through The Generative Programmer. During that time, I’ve read countless guides, papers, tools, and courses. This post is a curated top list of the best prompt engineering resources I’ve found so far.
👉 If you’re building with LLMs, agents, or generative AI, bookmark this. It’s a living list.
📚 Books
There are many books on AI, but these go deep and explain how prompting actually works in real systems.
Prompt Engineering for LLMs – O’Reilly, John Berryman, Albert Ziegler
Prompt Engineering for Generative AI – O’Reilly, James Phoenix, Mike Taylor
Generative AI Design Patterns – O’Reilly, Valliappa Lakshmanan, Hannes Hapke
Prompt Design Patterns – Yi Zhou
Unlocking Secrets of Prompt Engineering – Packt, Gilbert Mizrahi
LLM Design Patterns – Packt, Ken Huang
Patterns of Application Development Using AI – Leanpub, Obie Fernandez
🎓 Courses
Most popular learning paths from beginner to advanced prompt engineering.
Learn Prompting – LearnPrompting
Advanced Prompt Engineering for LLMs – Elvis Saravia (DAIR.AI)
Prompt Engineering for Everybody – Udemy
Prompt Engineering: How to Talk to the AIs – LinkedIn Learning
🎥 Videos
Overview, discussions, workshops, and real-world explanations of prompt engineering.
Building with Anthropic Claude: Prompt Workshop – AI Engineer
Google’s 9 Hour AI Prompt Engineering Course in 20 Minutes – Tina Huang
Prompt Engineering – For Optimal LLM Performance – Valentina Alto
📄 Whitepapers
Research that introduced modern prompting techniques like CoT, ToT, self-consistency, tool use, and reflection.
The Prompt Report: A Systematic Survey of Prompt Engineering Techniques – Schulhoff et al
https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06608A Prompt Pattern Catalog to Enhance Prompt Engineering with ChatGPT – Jules White et al
https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.11382A Systematic Survey of Prompt Engineering in Large Language Models – Pranab Sahoo et al
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.07927Buffer of Thoughts: Thought-Augmented Reasoning with LLMs – Ling Yang et al
https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04271Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts – Nelson F. Liu et al
https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.03172Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools – Timo Schick et al
https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04761Prompting in the Wild – Mahan Tafreshipour et al
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17298PromptSource – Stephen H. Bach et al
https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.01279Repository-Level Prompt Generation for LLMs of Code – Disha Shrivastava et al
https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.12839Conversing with Copilot – Paul Denny et al
https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.15157Tree of Thoughts – Shunyu Yao et al
https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10601Chain-of-Thought Prompting – Jason Wei et al
https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903Reflexion – Noah Shinn et al
https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11366Reprompting – Weijia Xu et al
https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09993LLMs Are Human-Level Prompt Engineers – Yongchao Zhou et al
https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.01910Self-Consistency Improves Chain-of-Thought Reasoning – Xuezhi Wang et al
https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.11171Language Models Are Zero-Shot Reasoners – Takeshi Kojima et al
https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916Prompt Engineering (Whitepaper) – Lee Boonstra
https://www.kaggle.com/whitepaper-prompt-engineeringThe DALL·E 2 Prompt Book (PDF) – dallery.gallery
https://dallery.gallery/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/The-DALL%C2%B7E-2-prompt-book.pdf
🌐 Websites & Roadmaps
Living documentation, continuously updated guides, and structured learning paths.
Prompt Engineering Guide – Sander Schulhoff
https://learnprompting.org/docs/introductionPrompting Guide AI – DAIR.AI
Prompt Engineering Overview – Anthropic
https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/overview
✍️ Articles & Blogs
Practical write-ups from teams actively shipping LLM-powered systems.
Anthropic Claude Code Best Practices – Anthropic
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-practicesOpenAI Best Practices for Prompt Engineering – OpenAI
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6654000-best-practices-for-prompt-engineering-with-the-openai-apiOpenAI Prompt Engineering Guide – OpenAI
https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/prompt-engineeringOpenAI Cookbook Related Resources – OpenAI
https://cookbook.openai.com/articles/related_resourcesMistral Prompting Capabilities – Mistral AI
https://docs.mistral.ai/capabilities/completion/prompting_capabilitiesParaHelp Prompt Design Blog – ParaHelp
https://parahelp.com/blog/prompt-designOpenAI Techniques to Improve Reliability – OpenAI
https://cookbook.openai.com/articles/techniques_to_improve_reliabilityOpenAI Guides: Optimizing LLM Accuracy – OpenAI
https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/optimizing-llm-accuracyWikipedia: Prompt Engineering – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineeringLilian Weng Prompt Engineering Guide – Lilian Weng
https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2023-03-15-prompt-engineering/Automated Prompt Engineering: Hands-On Guide – Towards Data Science
https://towardsdatascience.com/automated-prompt-engineering-the-definitive-hands-on-guide-1476c8cd3c50/Advanced Prompt Engineering (Chain-of-Thought) – Towards Data Science
https://towardsdatascience.com/advanced-prompt-engineering-chain-of-thought-cot-8d8b090bf699/5 Prompt Engineering Tips for Developers – Slobodan Mehmedovic
https://slobodan.me/posts/5-prompt-engineering-tips-for-developers/Anatomy of a Prompt – Gyorgy Bakocs
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/anatomy-prompt-gyorgy-bakocs/Gemini 3 Prompt Practices – Phil Schmid
https://www.philschmid.de/gemini-3-prompt-practicesPrompt Engineering vs Blind Prompting – Mitchell Hashimoto
https://mitchellh.com/writing/prompt-engineering-vs-blind-promptingDeterministic Quoting – Matty Yeung
https://mattyyeung.github.io/deterministic-quotingRewrite Your Prompts – Max Leiter
https://maxleiter.com/blog/rewrite-your-promptsPrompt201 Guide – Amatria
https://amatria.in/blog/prompt201Prompt Engineering Blog – Amatria
https://amatria.in/blog/PromptEngineeringAI Tools Up: Prompt Engineering Resources – aiToolsUp
https://aitoolsup.com/best-resources-to-become-prompt-engineer/Prompt Examples – OpenAI
https://platform.openai.com/docs/examplesPrompt Engineering Roadmap – Roadmap.sh
https://roadmap.sh/prompt-engineering
🧰 GitHub Repositories
Hands-on prompt examples, tooling, collections, and experiments.
⚙️ Tools & Services
Playgrounds, prompt testing tools, optimizers, and prompt management platforms.
OpenAI Chat Playground https://platform.openai.com/chat/edit
OpenAI Tokenizer https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer
PromptPerfect https://promptperfect.xyz/
FlowGPT Guide https://guide.flowgpt.com/
PromptPort https://promptport.ai/
Prompt Optimizer https://promptoptimizer.tools/
TextSynth Completion Playground https://textsynth.com/completion.html
PromptLayer https://www.promptlayer.com/platform/prompt-management
Reverse Prompt Engineer https://www.agenticworkers.com/reverse-prompt-engineer
💬 Communities
Where prompt engineers share techniques, failures, and experiments.
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