MCP for Beginners — Syllabus
Sources (1)
This course is a LearnOS port of Microsoft's open-source mcp-for-beginners curriculum (17.1k GitHub stars), restructured so every section is searchable and citable from chat, and readable inside Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex through the LearnOS MCP server. The upstream repo is the canonical copy; this port credits it on every lesson and tracks it for updates.
What you'll be able to do
- Explain the core concepts the upstream curriculum teaches, in your own words, with a source for each claim.
- Run and adapt the hands-on examples; the code samples link back to the upstream folders.
- Use chat-with-lesson and cross-course chat to connect this material to the rest of your LearnOS library.
Prerequisites
Comfort reading code in at least one language (Python, TypeScript, or C#) and basic familiarity with calling an LLM API. Related LearnOS courses: Claude Code at Work, AI Engineering, RAG.
The roadmap
Modules are sequenced as upstream orders them; each lesson lists the previous lesson as its prerequisite.
| Module | Lessons | Minutes |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction to MCP | 1 | 16 |
| Core Concepts | 1 | 40 |
| Security | 1 | 26 |
| Getting Started: Servers, Clients and Hosts | 16 | 669 |
| Practical Implementation | 2 | 50 |
| Advanced Topics | 18 | 458 |
| Community and Contributions | 1 | 30 |
| Lessons from Early Adopters | 1 | 30 |
| Development Best Practices | 2 | 129 |
| Case Studies | 2 | 26 |
| Building an MCP Server with AI Toolkit | 5 | 65 |
| Hands-On Labs: MCP Server with PostgreSQL | 14 | 498 |
| Tooling | 2 | 15 |
Time commitment
About 34.2 hours of reading and labs across 13 modules (66 lessons). A cadence of one module per week finishes in 13 weeks.
How to study in LearnOS
Read a lesson, then ask chat-with-lesson to quiz you on it before moving on; highlight anything you want to keep and turn highlights into flashcards, which LearnOS schedules with spaced repetition. From Claude Code or Cursor, connect the LearnOS MCP server and ask questions while you build; answers cite the exact section. Do the labs in your own environment rather than reading them.
The capstone
Ship a small working project using what the final module teaches, documented in a README you could hand a teammate. Post it in the course notes so others can see it.
What this course omits
Vendor-specific setup steps that are already covered by the upstream repo's platform guides, and translated versions of the material. Where upstream is opinionated toward Microsoft tooling, the concepts transfer; the LearnOS chat can help you map them to Anthropic, OpenAI, or open-weight stacks.
Sources
- mcp-for-beginners — Microsoft, MIT License. Ported 2026-09-17.