Building Intelligent Agents with Google ADK

Building Intelligent Agents with Google's ADK
is your definitive, hands-on guide to mastering Google's Agent Development Kit—an open-source, code-first Python toolkit designed for crafting robust, modular, and deployable AI agents. It is built for developers who want to write testable, version-controlled, and flexible agentic applications with the full power of Python and its rich ecosystem.
Inside this comprehensive guide, you will master:




Core ADK Foundations:
Go beyond the surface to understand the fundamental building blocks of ADK. You'll learn the distinct roles of the Runner for execution, the Agent as the core logic unit, and the crucial Session, Artifact, and Memory services that provide your agents with short-term context, file handling, and long-term knowledge.




Empowering Agents with an Unmatched Tooling Ecosystem:
An agent's true power comes from its tools. This book provides extensive coverage of ADK's tooling capabilities, showing you how to:


Wrap any Python function into a tool with FunctionTool, complete with automatic schema generation from type hints and docstrings.


Instantly generate entire toolsets from
OpenAPI (Swagger) specifications
to interact with any REST API.


Leverage pre-packaged toolsets for
Google APIs
like Calendar, BigQuery, and Gmail, with built-in handling for complex OAuth2 flows.


Bridge ecosystems by using tools from other popular frameworks like
Langchain and CrewAI
directly within your ADK agents.








Advanced Agent Capabilities:
Elevate your agents from simple responders to dynamic problem solvers.




Code Execution:
A cornerstone of ADK's power. You'll learn to implement secure code execution using various backends, from the seamless BuiltInCodeExecutor in Gemini models and the cloud-native VertexAiCodeExecutor, to the isolated ContainerCodeExecutor for enhanced security.




Planning and Reasoning:
Implement sophisticated reasoning with ADK's planners, including the explicit, step-by-step logic of the PlanReActPlanner to make your agent's thought process transparent and robust.








Designing and Implementing Multi-Agent Systems:
Learn the principles of building applications where multiple specialized agents collaborate. This book details how to implement common architectures—
Hierarchical, Sequential, and Parallel
—using ADK's agent transfer mechanism and its powerful shell orchestrators (SequentialAgent, ParallelAgent, and LoopAgent).




Full Lifecycle Management: From Development to Deployment:
We cover the complete operational lifecycle of an agent.




Persistence:
Master session and state management with persistent backends like DatabaseSessionService (for SQL databases) and GcsArtifactService (for Google Cloud Storage).




Evaluation:
Dive deep into ADK's built-in evaluation framework. Learn to define EvalSets and EvalCases to test tool trajectory and response quality, and use the adk eval CLI to automate regression testing and performance benchmarking.




Deployment:
Take your agent from local development to a live service by packaging it and deploying it to serverless platforms like
Google Cloud Run
.






Furthermore, each chapter is packed with:




Runnable Code Examples:
Dozens of self-contained Python scripts and configuration files, meticulously crafted to demonstrate each concept.




Extensive Diagrams:
Over 50 diagrams visualize everything from high-level architectures and class relationships to detailed sequence flows of agent interactions, making complex concepts easy to grasp.