Building with the Claude API

The largest thing in the Academy catalogue: 67 lessons, 8 quizzes, 9 hours, covering prompting, tool use, RAG, agents, MCP and production patterns.

Three near-identical courses, one decision

Course	Lessons	Quizzes	Length
Building with the Claude API	67	8	9 h
Claude with Amazon Bedrock	65	8	8 h
Claude with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI	66	9	8.5 h

Around 200 lessons between them, and largely the same material with a different delivery platform. Take one. Which one follows from where you will actually deploy — see Bedrock vs Google Cloud vs Foundry, and note that Foundry has no course of its own.

If you are undecided, the first-party API course is the safer default: it is the platform the others are resold from, and Fast mode and Managed Agents exist only there.

Nine hours is a real commitment

Claude Platform 101 is 90 minutes and tells you whether this one is worth it. Take that first.

Verify the moving parts yourself

A nine-hour course cannot track a platform that ships weekly. Before shipping, check the current state of: deprecated sampling parameters, per-model thinking support, prompt caching multipliers, and your model’s retirement date.