Claude 101: the free beginner course.
Claude 101 is a free beginner course that takes you from never having opened Claude to sitting your first scored practice exam, in about 70 minutes of reading. Six lessons, no account needed to start, no paid tier. It assumes no prior experience and ends where real preparation begins - a 10-minute diagnostic that names your weakest exam domain.
Where this ends
With a free diagnostic that names your weakest exam domain - so the next thing you study is the right thing.
What you need.
- No prior Claude experience. That is the point of this course.
- No account, no card. Every lesson is open; the diagnostic at the end is open too.
- No coding required until lesson 5, and even there the point is the workflow rather than the syntax.
Six lessons, in order.
Each lesson is a page you can read on its own. Taken in order they build the one skill everything else rests on: giving Claude the right context.
- 01
What Claude actually is
Time: 5 min
Claude is Anthropic's AI assistant, and the useful version of that sentence is about what it does with context rather than what it is. Start with the narrative version, written for someone who has never opened it.
Read: how to get started with Claude → - 02
The three ways to use Claude
Time: 10 min
Chat, then Projects, then Claude Code. Each rung reuses the context of the one below it, and that reuse is the whole skill. Anthropic's own Claude 101 lesson, mirrored and mapped to what the exam asks.
Open: Claude 101, exam-aligned → - 03
Prompting, properly
Time: 15 min
Role, context, task, format. This is the single highest-return habit for a beginner and it is 20% of the exam as Domain 4, so learning it well is not a detour.
Learn: prompt engineering techniques → - 04
Making context durable
Time: 15 min
Retyping context every session is the beginner tax. CLAUDE.md is how you stop paying it, and how a project's knowledge compounds instead of evaporating.
Learn: the CLAUDE.md hierarchy → - 05
Claude Code, the third rung
Time: 20 min
Where Claude stops being a chat window and starts acting on a codebase. The workflows and the context discipline the certification expects.
Open: Claude Code 101 → - 06
Find out where you stand
Time: 10 min
Ten questions, no account, instant explanations. It names your weakest of the five exam domains and builds a study plan around it - which is the honest end of a beginner course and the start of a real one.
Take the free diagnostic →
What you will be able to do.
- Explain what Claude is doing with your context, not just what it replied.
- Choose between chat, Projects and Claude Code for a given piece of work.
- Write a prompt that states role, context, task and format - and know why that order matters.
- Keep a project's context durable instead of retyping it every session.
- Name your weakest of the five CCA-F exam domains, from your own diagnostic result rather than a guess.
4 questions about Claude 101
Every Q is phrased as a real Google search query. Answers cite the same evidence-tagged sources used elsewhere on the site.