Why I built this programme

PREFACE

I have written ten books before this one, and each of them was an answer to a single question from a single reader. This programme does something none of them could do: it takes a reader who knows nothing at all about the subject and walks them up, one degree at a time, until they have mastered it.

In every hall I have lectured in and every committee I have sat on, I noticed the same thing. The question people really wanted answered was never one of the technical questions I had prepared for. It was much simpler than those, and much harder: "Where do I start?"

A brilliant doctor asks me how to use AI without betraying the trust his patients place in him. A lawyer asks whether the text a model wrote for him would stand up in court. A teacher asks how she is supposed to tell a student who has learned something from a student who has simply copied it. The founder of a startup asks how to build a product on a technology whose limits he does not yet understand. Every one of these people — without a single exception — has intelligence, experience and good intentions. What none of them has is a ladder to climb.

Technical books assume that you are already technical. Simplified books reassure you for an afternoon and then leave you exactly where they found you. And there is nothing in between the two that will carry you from knowing nothing to knowing the subject properly, in one unbroken line.

This programme is that line. I have gathered into it everything twenty years have taught me across systems engineering, information security, AI governance, innovation and the leading of teams. I have not arranged it as an archive of my own work, but as a road you can actually walk.

I have given you everything I know, and — this matters a great deal more — everything I got wrong along the way. Nothing in this profession has served me as well as the nights I spent realising that I had been mistaken.

"A life's work is more than a record of positions held; it is a story of purpose and progress, and the legacy one leaves behind."

I wrote this programme because I would like something more useful than a CV to remain after me. I would like a young Arab in a small town to find in these pages what it took me twenty years to assemble. If that happens, then the programme has done what it was written to do, and I have paid a debt I owed.

Prof. Dr. Eng. Mohamed Fawzi Elgendi

Dubai — 2026