Claude Guides

From zero to building with Claude. A free, open-source curriculum of 26 hands-on modules — read, run the notebooks, do the exercises. At your own pace, free forever.

Live site: claudeguides.berta.one Publisher: Rondanini Publishing Ltd. · Licence: MIT

What you'll learn

A five-stage journey, mapped to where you are right now:

Stage	What you can do at the end
01 · Foundations (Modules 1–5)	Run a prompt from Python, pick a model, write prompts that work, wrap calls safely, keep token costs honest.
02 · Practitioner (Modules 6–10)	Apply chain-of-thought, structured outputs, tool use, RAG, and multi-turn conversations.
03 · Builder (Modules 11–15)	Ship analysis, code, content, and multi-step reasoning workloads that survive real users.
04 · Pro (Modules 16–20)	Optimise cost and latency, scale across teams, prove quality with evals.
05 · Specialties (S1–S6)	Apply Claude to BI, research, creative writing, education, software engineering, and PM work.

Browse all modules: claudeguides.berta.one/guides.

What's in every module

Outcomes up front — "by the end you'll have…" in one paragraph. No buried promises.
Real, runnable code. Every module has at least one python … example you can copy-paste and run on a free-tier API key.
A walkthrough explaining why the code works, not just what it does.
Three notebooks (01_introduction, 02_intermediate, 03_advanced) you can open in nbviewer or Colab without installing anything.
A module checklist so you know when you've actually got it.

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/Berta-one/claude-guides.git
cd claude-guides
python3 -m venv venv && source venv/bin/activate
pip install -U anthropic python-dotenv jupyter
cp .env.example .env       # then put your ANTHROPIC_API_KEY into it
python guides/guide-01-getting-started/scripts/main_application.py

If you saw a structured response from Claude, you're done with setup — open Module 1.

Full setup walkthrough: GETTING_STARTED.md.

What this is not

Not API documentation. Use docs.anthropic.com for the canonical API reference.
Not certification. No exams, no badges. The checklists at the end of each module are honour-system.
Not a replacement for building. The curriculum is scaffolding — the way you actually learn is by shipping a small thing using these patterns. Module 1 starts you off.

Repository layout

claude-guides/
├── guides/             # 26 modules, each with README + notebooks + scripts + exercises
├── tools/              # build_site.py (static site), check_links.py (CI lint)
├── web/                # JS/CSS for the docs-style browser at the repo root
├── public/             # generated static site (after `sh tools/ci_build_static_site.sh`)
├── assets/             # SVG icons, diagrams, shared styles
├── config/             # paid_courses.json (pluggable instructor-led tracks)
├── GETTING_STARTED.md  # five-minute setup
├── CURRICULUM.md       # the journey, narrated
└── INDEX.md            # alphabetical map of every doc and asset

The build system is tools/build_site.py (Python, two deps, ~1500 lines). It walks every Markdown file, renders it to HTML with the journey navigation injected, and copies notebooks/scripts into public/ so nbviewer and "raw" links work. CI runs it on every push to master (.github/workflows/pages.yml) and serves the result via GitHub Pages.

Contributing

We welcome:

Corrections to anything that's wrong — code that doesn't run, links that 404, outdated model IDs.
Better examples for the modules whose body content is still scaffolded (notebooks/exercises in particular).
New specialties — if you have a domain where Claude shines and we don't have a module, open an issue.

Quick how-to:

Fork → branch → open a PR. CI validates internal links automatically.
Run python tools/check_links.py --all locally before pushing.
Use current Claude model IDs (claude-haiku-4-5-20251001, claude-sonnet-4-6, claude-opus-4-7) — see Module 2 for the family map.

Full guide: CONTRIBUTING.md.

Free curriculum, optional paid courses

The 26 modules in guides/ are free forever. Rondanini Publishing Ltd. also offers cohort-based courses, instructor-led tracks, and team workshops for organisations that want guided onboarding. Those live at PAID_COURSES.html.

Free or paid, the patterns in the curriculum are the same — the paid version adds people, schedule, and accountability. Many of the best contributors are free-curriculum learners who never paid for anything.

Project status

Curriculum: all 26 module READMEs rewritten with hands-on outcomes and real code (April 2026).
Notebooks/exercises: scaffolded but not yet rewritten to the same depth — that's the next big push. See the roadmap issue for what we're prioritising.
Site: deployed to GitHub Pages, mirrored at claudeguides.berta.one. Built static HTML; no client-side rendering.
CI: every push validates Markdown links and (post-build) every internal href in the rendered HTML.

Licence and credits

Code and curriculum text: MIT (see LICENSE).
"Claude" is a trademark of Anthropic. This repository is independent and not affiliated with Anthropic.
Cover and design language inspired by Berta Chapters.
Contributors: see CONTRIBUTING.md.

If this curriculum saved you time, sponsor the project so we can keep it free.

New here? Follow this order: 1 · Setup 2 · First module Curriculum map · Paid courses

Notebook links: nbviewer uses nbviewer.jupyter.org/url/… (not nbviewer.org) and loads the file via jsDelivr (cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/…) so Project Jupyter does not hit GitHub’s REST API (which can return 503 when rate-limited). Requires a public repo mirror (Berta-one/claude-guides, branch master). Raw points at the copy on this website (same path under claudeguides.berta.one). Colab and the GitHub file link also need that public mirror. Forks: set CLAUDE_GUIDES_GITHUB_REPO and CLAUDE_GUIDES_BRANCH when building. You can always clone the repo and open .ipynb locally.

No install? Open the first notebook via nbviewer (via nbviewer.jupyter.org + jsDelivr), Colab, GitHub, or raw .ipynb from this site for local Jupyter.