Learning Claude
A guide to getting started with Claude, spanning Anthropic’s official training and the workflows that working researchers have built, tested and shared.
Official sources from Anthropic
The authoritative starting points, free of charge and updated as new models and features are released.
Free, self-paced courses arranged in tracks: AI fluency for non-technical users, product training for everyday use and deeper material for developers working with the API. A certificate follows on completion, and registration requires only an email.
Official Documentation ↗The reference for everything from basic usage to API configuration, Claude Code and the prompt-engineering guide. The place to check when something needs to be precise.
Claude Code: Best Practices ↗Anthropic’s own notes on agentic coding: configuring the setup, writing CLAUDE.md files, planning before implementation and verifying the output. The most useful official account of how the tool is meant to be used.
Anthropic Courses on GitHub ↗Five practical courses, best taken in order: API fundamentals, an interactive prompt-engineering tutorial, real-world prompting, prompt evaluation and tool use. Each is a Jupyter notebook to run locally.
The Anthropic Cookbook ↗Reusable code samples for more advanced work: PDF processing, embeddings, citations and the like. Most useful once the foundational courses are behind you.
The Prompt Library ↗A browsable set of example prompts for writing, coding, analysis and business tasks. Each is annotated, so the design choices behind it are visible and easy to adapt.
Community: academic field guides
A handful of academics have documented, in unusual detail, how they use Claude Code for research, teaching and writing. Opinionated, well tested and free to adopt.
A thorough account of AI-assisted academic work across slides, papers and analysis. It rests on specialised review agents, an adversarial loop of critic and fixer, quality gates and a replication-first approach to code, and ships as a template others can fork. Its ecosystem section doubles as a map of the wider field.
Tools, templates and a working philosophy for coding, teaching and presentations with Claude Code. It is the source of Referee 2, an independent audit and replication protocol; Blindspot, a structured review of one’s own output; and the Rhetoric of Decks, an approach to Beamer slides worth looking at.
A guide to artificial intelligence for professionals who do not write code. It covers executive-assistant workflows, inbox triage, proposal drafting, project dashboards and a self-improving configuration, alongside a library of skills that install with a single command. The name is a joke; the tools are not.
Research workflows organised around the paper, with a large cast of specialised agents (worker and critic pairs, referees, a data engineer and a verifier), a simulated blind peer-review pipeline and compliance with American Economic Association replication standards across the research lifecycle.
Community: general and going deeper
Broader starting points and continually updated lists, useful whatever you are building.
A continually updated list of Claude Code skills, slash commands and agents drawn from across the community. A good place to see what others have already built before starting your own.
45 Claude Code Tips ↗A collection of tips, from the basic to the advanced: custom status lines, trimming the system prompt, editor integration and assorted tricks for managing context. Quick wins for everyday use.
Find more
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The Ecosystem section
· in Sant’Anna’s guide
A maintained directory of community projects (clo-author, autoresearch, ClaudeCodeTools, stata-mcp, AEA templates and more), each with a candid note on what it is for. The most useful single index.
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Claude Blattman › Resources
· curated influences
Blattman’s own annotated list of the workflows and writing that shaped his system.
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claudeblattman / skills
· downloadable skills
Around twenty skills for academic knowledge work, ready to install.
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MixtapeTools / workflow.md
· the philosophy first
Cunningham’s essay on treating Claude as a thinking partner rather than a code generator. Worth reading before the tools.
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Claude Code documentation
· official reference
The foundation beneath all of the above: agents, skills, hooks, permissions and MCP.