September 2026
Intermediate to advanced
350 pages
10h 3m
English
Content preview from AI Agents with MCP
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 2. An Introduction to the Model Context Protocol
To best understand MCP, it’s important to understand its history, what inspired its creation, what problems it solves for developers, and how it is designed. The growth of the protocol’s usage has been nothing short of explosive, and with the rapid development of the protocol itself, the official and unofficial SDKs, and the wider ecosystem, it’s easy to lose sight of why MCP was created in the first place and what problems it was designed to solve. Having a deep understanding of these details will help you better understand the design choices made in the protocol and how to best leverage the components that MCP provides.
First, we will get into a time machine and travel all the way back to 2024, when an Anthropic engineer was getting annoyed at having to constantly switch between Claude Desktop and his code editor. You will learn about this surprising origin story of MCP, including the diverse tools and frustrations that inspired its creation. Then, we will take a look at some of the problems MCP was built to solve through the lens of its creation. We will also look at some real-world usages of MCP, such as MCP servers (both local and remote) and applications that host MCP clients, enabling the use of MCP servers. You will see how they solve not only their specific problems, but the broader ones that the protocol was designed to handle. Finally, with all this context, we will dig into the architecture of MCP itself: its ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.