Anthropic Official Courses

Official educational courses from Anthropic covering Claude API fundamentals, prompt engineering, real-world prompting patterns, tool use, and prompt evaluations. Each course includes hands-on Jupyter notebooks.

Anthropic courses

Welcome to Anthropic's educational courses. This repository currently contains five courses. We suggest completing the courses in the following order:

  1. Anthropic API fundamentals - teaches the essentials of working with the Claude SDK: getting an API key, working with model parameters, writing multimodal prompts, streaming responses, etc.
  2. Prompt engineering interactive tutorial - a comprehensive step-by-step guide to key prompting techniques. [AWS Workshop version]
  3. Real world prompting - learn how to incorporate prompting techniques into complex, real world prompts. [Google Vertex version]
  4. Prompt evaluations - learn how to write production prompt evaluations to measure the quality of your prompts.
  5. Tool use - teaches everything you need to know to implement tool use successfully in your workflows with Claude.

Please note that these courses often favor our lowest-cost model, Claude 3 Haiku, to keep API costs down for students following along with the materials. Feel free to use other Claude models if you prefer.

Anthropic API fundamentals

A series of notebook tutorials that cover the essentials of working with Claude models and the Anthropic SDK including:

Welcome to Anthropic's Prompt Engineering Interactive Tutorial

Course introduction and goals

This course is intended to provide you with a comprehensive step-by-step understanding of how to engineer optimal prompts within Claude.

After completing this course, you will be able to:

  • Master the basic structure of a good prompt
  • Recognize common failure modes and learn the '80/20' techniques to address them
  • Understand Claude's strengths and weaknesses
  • Build strong prompts from scratch for common use cases

Course structure and content

This course is structured to allow you many chances to practice writing and troubleshooting prompts yourself. The course is broken up into 9 chapters with accompanying exercises, as well as an appendix of even more advanced methods. It is intended for you to work through the course in chapter order.

Each lesson has an "Example Playground" area at the bottom where you are free to experiment with the examples in the lesson and see for yourself how changing prompts can change Claude's responses. There is also an answer key.

Note: This tutorial uses our smallest, fastest, and cheapest model, Claude 3 Haiku. Anthropic has two other models, Claude 3 Sonnet and Claude 3 Opus, which are more intelligent than Haiku, with Opus being the most intelligent.

This tutorial also exists on Google Sheets using Anthropic's Claude for Sheets extension. We recommend using that version as it is more user friendly.

When you are ready to begin, go to 01_Basic Prompt Structure to proceed.

Table of Contents

Each chapter consists of a lesson and a set of exercises.

Beginner

  • Chapter 1: Basic Prompt Structure

  • Chapter 2: Being Clear and Direct

  • Chapter 3: Assigning Roles

Intermediate

  • Chapter 4: Separating Data from Instructions

  • Chapter 5: Formatting Output & Speaking for Claude

  • Chapter 6: Precognition (Thinking Step by Step)

  • Chapter 7: Using Examples

Advanced

  • Chapter 8: Avoiding Hallucinations

  • Chapter 9: Building Complex Prompts (Industry Use Cases)

    • Complex Prompts from Scratch - Chatbot
    • Complex Prompts for Legal Services
    • Exercise: Complex Prompts for Financial Services
    • Exercise: Complex Prompts for Coding
    • Congratulations & Next Steps

  • Appendix: Beyond Standard Prompting

    • Chaining Prompts
    • Tool Use
    • Search & Retrieval

Real world prompting

Welcome to Anthropic's comprehensive real world prompting tutorial. This course is designed for experienced developers who have already dipped their toes into the world of prompt engineering, particularly those who have completed our comprehensive Prompt engineering interactive tutorial. If you haven't gone through that tutorial yet, we strongly recommend you do so before continuing, as it provides an in-depth exploration of various prompting techniques with hands-on exercises.

Across five lessons, you will learn how to incorporate key prompting techniques into complex, real world prompts. We recommend that you start from the beginning with the Prompting recap lesson, as each lesson builds on key concepts taught in previous ones.

Table of contents

Tool use

Welcome to Anthropic's comprehensive tool use tutorial. Across six lessons, you will learn everything you need to know to implement tool use successfully in your workflows with Claude. We recommend that you start from the beginning with the tool use overview, as each lesson builds on key concepts taught in previous ones.

Table of contents

Prompt evaluations

Welcome to Anthropic's comprehensive prompt evaluations course. Across nine lessons, you will learn everything you need to know to implement evaluations successfully in your workflows with the Anthropic API. We recommend that you start from the beginning with the Evaluations 101 lesson, as each lesson builds on key concepts taught in previous ones.

Table of contents

  1. Evaluations 101
  2. Writing human-graded evals with Anthropic's Workbench
  3. Writing simple code-graded evals
  4. Writing a classification eval
  5. Promptfoo for evals: an introduction
  6. Writing classification evals with promptfoo
  7. Custom graders with promptfoo
  8. Model-graded evals with promptfoo
  9. Custom model-graded evals with promptfoo