September 2026
Intermediate to advanced
350 pages
10h 3m
English
Content preview from AI Agents with MCP
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Chapter 4. MCP Clients: Advanced Use and Best Practices
In Chapter 3, you learned how to build a client that supported the server primitives: tools, resources, and prompts. You learned a standard architecture for building clients and how to manage stdio and Streamable HTTP connections. To round out your client-building knowledge, this chapter will show you how to provide the server with client-based capabilities, use OAuth to allow servers to authorize your client users, and build for various models and model providers. You will also learn how to discover servers with the MCP Registry, connect to multiple servers, manage your context window with context engineering, and follow best practices for building your client.
Providing MCP Client Capabilities
This section introduces the use of callback functions to provide client capabilities to the connected MCP server. A client can provide a server with three major capabilities: sampling, where the server is able to request chat completions from the LLM the client is connected to via the client; roots, which indicate to servers what areas in the host application’s filesystem the server has access to; and elicitations, which allow the connected server to request information from the user.
Warning
Roots, sampling, and logging are all in the process of being deprecated in the specification and in the official SDKs, as server-initiated requests are no longer in the specification. They are still covered here so that you can support older ...
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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.