January 2027
Intermediate
254 pages
6h 56m
English
Content preview from Claude Code: Up and Running
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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 7. MCP and External Integrations
Chapter 6 turned repeated instructions into skills and hooks. The natural next question is why you would need anything beyond them. If a skill can teach Claude Code how to use a command-line tool, why expose a separate service at all? The answer is client portability through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
This chapter shows how to configure and authenticate MCP servers. Then it connects Claude Code to three of them: MockHub, this book’s enterprise-scale application; SonarQube Cloud, for code quality; and Context7, for current library documentation. Along the way you’ll see when a skill plus a command-line tool beats an MCP server, what a logged-in browser tab can do when a site offers no integration at all, and two ways to call another coding agent.
Why MCP Exists
A large language model on its own can only answer from training data and whatever you pasted into the prompt. Tool use, also called function calling, changed that. The pattern is straightforward: you describe a function ...
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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.