Generative AI for Beginners

Generative AI for Beginners is a 21-lesson open-source course published by Microsoft Cloud Advocates on GitHub under the MIT License. It covers everything from foundational concepts like how LLMs work to hands-on build lessons for text generation, chat, image generation, RAG, and AI agents. The course supports both Python and TypeScript code examples and integrates with Azure OpenAI Service, the GitHub Marketplace Model Catalog, and the OpenAI API.

What It Is

This is a structured, self-paced curriculum hosted as a GitHub repository, designed to take developers from zero knowledge of generative AI to building real applications. Lessons are divided into two types: "Learn" lessons that explain concepts, and "Build" lessons that pair explanations with working code. A companion .NET edition exists at a separate repository for .NET developers.

Course Structure and Curriculum

The 21 lessons progress from introductory theory to advanced applied topics:

• Lessons 01–05: Introduction to Generative AI and LLMs, comparing models, responsible AI, and prompt engineering fundamentals and advanced techniques
• Lessons 06–11: Building text generation apps, chat applications, search with vector databases, image generation apps, low-code AI apps, and function calling integrations
• Lessons 12–14: UX design for AI, securing AI applications, and the generative AI application lifecycle (LLMOps)
• Lessons 15–21: RAG and vector databases, open-source models with Hugging Face, AI agents, fine-tuning LLMs, small language models (SLMs), Mistral models, and Meta models

Each lesson includes a short video introduction, a written README, code samples, and a "Keep Learning" section with additional resources.

Setup Path and Prerequisites

Learners need a GitHub account to fork the repository and access to one of three supported API backends: Azure OpenAI Service, the GitHub Marketplace Model Catalog, or the OpenAI API. Basic knowledge of Python or TypeScript is helpful but not required — the course README links to beginner Python and TypeScript courses for absolute newcomers. A dedicated Course Setup lesson (Lesson 00) walks through configuring the development environment. The repository also supports sparse checkout to avoid downloading all 50+ language translation folders.

Multi-Language Support

The course ships with automated translations into more than 50 languages via GitHub Actions, including Arabic, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional variants), French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and many others. The translations are maintained automatically and kept up to date through the co-op translator workflow.

Open-Source Lineage and Community

The repository is published under the MIT License by Microsoft and is part of a broader "Microsoft for Beginners" series that also includes courses on ML, Data Science, AI, Web Dev, IoT, LangChain, MCP, AI Agents, and GitHub Copilot. Community support is provided through the official Azure AI Foundry Discord server and a GitHub-hosted Azure AI Foundry Developer Forum. The repository credits John Aziz for GitHub Actions and workflows, and Bernhard Merkle for learner and code experience contributions.