Drew Farris

Drew Farris is a technology consultant, soft ware developer, and contributor to Mahout, Lucene, and Solr.

books by Drew Farris

How Large Language Models Work

  • MEAP began March 2024
  • Last updated November 2024
  • Publication in July 2025 (estimated)
  • ISBN 9781633437081
  • 200 pages (estimated)
  • printed in black & white

How Large Language Models Work is an introduction to LLMs that explores OpenAI’s GPT models. The book takes you inside ChatGPT, showing how a prompt becomes text output. In clear, plain language, this illuminating book shows you when and why LLMs make errors, and how you can account for inaccuracies in your AI solutions. Once you know how LLMs work, you’ll be ready to start exploring the bigger questions of AI, such as how LLMs “think” differently that humans, how to best design LLM-powered systems that work well with human operators, and what ethical, legal, and security issues can—and will—arise from AI automation.

Taming Text

  • December 2012
  • ISBN 9781933988382
  • 320 pages
  • printed in black & white
  • Available translations: Korean

There is so much text in our lives, we are practically drowning in it. Fortunately, there are innovative tools and techniques for managing unstructured information that can throw the smart developer a much-needed lifeline. You'll find them in this book.

Taming Text is a practical, example-driven guide to working with text in real applications. This book introduces you to useful techniques like full-text search, proper name recognition, clustering, tagging, information extraction, and summarization. You'll explore real use cases as you systematically absorb the foundations upon which they are built.

Written in a clear and concise style, this book avoids jargon, explaining the subject in terms you can understand without a background in statistics or natural language processing. Examples are in Java, but the concepts can be applied in any language.