The complete beginner-to-builder guide to working with Claude — the apps, the prompts, Projects, Claude Code, skills and MCP — plus a hand-picked catalogue of 100 skills from across GitHub, each explained in one plain line.
2026 edition
No hype, no prompt-tricks listicle. A clear path you can actually follow — written the way we teach it live at the Academy.
What Claude actually is, the apps, the model tiers, and which plan is worth paying for.
Prompting that works the first time — the four parts of every good ask, and the five common mistakes.
Projects, files, Artifacts and connectors — getting Claude working on your documents and data.
The terminal that reads and edits your files. Your first session in three steps — no dev background needed.
How Claude gains new, repeatable abilities — and how the three fit together.
A worked example, start to finish, using the exact loop we run in the live sessions.
Privacy, verifying output, keeping spend sane, and the habits of people who get the most out of it.
Ten categories, ten skills each — what every one does and when to reach for it.
Resources, the official docs that matter, and how to keep going after the book.
Ten categories of ten. No fake star-rankings — a curated, honest catalogue drawn from the official anthropics/skills repo and the main community collections, each skill in one line you'll actually understand.
pdf · docx · pptx · xlsx · invoices · contracts
review · tests · debug · refactor · CI · SQL
landing pages · components · SEO · a11y · perf
clean · chart · dashboards · stats · forecast
blog · edit · social · translate · summarise
brand · art · slides · icons · palettes
SEO · ads · email flows · proposals · pricing
notes · tasks · SOPs · research · decisions
skills · MCP · browser · schedules · pipelines
tutor · flashcards · interview prep · planners
Claude only knows what's in front of it right now: your message, the files you attached, and the earlier turns in this conversation. This single fact explains almost every "why did it do that?" moment — the thing it needed usually just wasn't in front of it.
No. Chapters 1–3 and most of the skill catalogue need zero coding. The Claude Code chapters are written for people who've never touched a terminal — the whole point is that you describe what you want in plain language.
No. Prompt tricks go stale fast. This teaches the method — how Claude actually works, how to steer it, and how to turn repeated work into reusable skills — so it keeps paying off long after any single trick would.
We're honest about this: there's no reliable star-ranking of skills — the numbers conflict across trackers and change weekly. So it's a curated catalogue by category, drawn from the official anthropics/skills repo and the main community lists, chosen for usefulness, not clicks.
A PDF you can read on any device and keep forever. Claude's features move quickly, so the book teaches durable ideas and points you to the official docs for anything version-specific — and you get free updates to the current edition.
The book is the map; the courses and the free Sunday webinar are where you build with guidance. Read the book first and you'll get far more out of a live session — many people start exactly this way.
Read it this weekend. Build your first real tool by Monday.
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