Building with the Claude API

Building with the Claude API is a free, comprehensive video course from Anthropic — about eight hours across eighty-four lessons — for backend developers integrating Claude into production applications. It runs the full span of the Claude API, from basic usage through advanced agent architectures, in Python. You start with the fundamentals (authentication, basic requests, multi-turn conversations, system prompts, streaming, and structured output), then move into prompt engineering and evaluation: writing prompts that hold up, and testing them systematically with automated evaluation pipelines rather than by eye. From there it builds outward — custom tools and function calling to connect Claude to external services; retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines with text chunking, embeddings, hybrid search, reranking, and contextual retrieval; Model Context Protocol (MCP) for connecting Claude to data sources; Anthropic's own tools (Claude Code and Computer Use) in action; and finally the architecture patterns behind agents and workflows — parallel execution, operation chaining, conditional routing, and how to debug them. It is the deep, build-real-services treatment of the platform.