Entertainment

I Took All 18 Anthropic Courses in One Weekend (Honest Review)

by Matt Penny | Applied AI

📚 Main topics

Introductory Claude coursesClaude 101 is a decent introduction to Claude’s features, while Claude Code 101 has useful material on the CLAUDE.md file, skills, MCPs, and context management, but also includes filler. The Cowork course covers setup, skills, and plugins, but misses important connections. 0:30
Courses the reviewer recommends skippingThe reviewer considers AI Fluency, AI Fluency for Educators and Students, Teaching AI Fluency, AI Fluency for Nonprofits, and AI Fluency for Small Businesses unhelpful or too fluffy to recommend. 5:42
Technical coursesClaude Code in Action mostly repeats Claude Code 101, while Building with the Claude API is in-depth. The MCP courses offer an introduction and advanced topics, and the Bedrock and Vertex courses overlap heavily with the API course and each other. 5:10
Skills and sub-agentsIntro to Agent Skills largely repeats earlier courses, while the sub-agents course is not recommended; the reviewer favors skills for practical use. 9:50

✨ Key takeaways

Certifications have little valueThe quizzes are easy enough to answer with Claude, so completing the certifications does not demonstrate much expertise. 1:33
Learn by doingCourses can introduce features, but the reviewer says using Claude to solve real problems is a more effective way to learn than watching lessons. 3:38
Choose one technical trackThe API, Bedrock, and Vertex courses cover much of the same ground, so interested learners should pick one rather than complete them all. 8:16
Focus on business opportunitiesThe more important skill is spotting business processes and bottlenecks where AI can make a meaningful difference. 11:23

🧠 Lessons learned

Build something usefulChoose a real problem, ask Claude how it could help, and experiment with its suggested features and approaches. This can teach you while producing a tool or workflow you can use. 4:08
Create skills from real processesBuilding skills around your own business processes is more practical than only reading or watching explanations of skills. 2:04
Check whether course content is currentThe reviewer says the Cowork course omits connections, making it less useful for learning how to connect Claude to external tools. 2:35

🏁 Conclusion/next steps

Best starting pointsClaude 101 and Claude Code 101 may help people new to Claude, while the Cowork course has useful material but important omissions. 10:52
Apply Claude to real workIdentify a process or bottleneck, then learn by trying to solve it with Claude and seeking help when you get stuck. 11:23
Explore skills nextThe video points viewers toward a follow-up about turning existing SOPs into reliable automated processes using skills. 11:53

Transcript excerpt

0:00 Most people are completely unaware that Anthropic have 18 full-length training courses all about Claude and they're completely free. But are they actually any good? Well, this weekend I went through every single one of them. I passed all of their certifications just so that I could tell you if they're any good or not. Yes, this is really how I spend my weekends. So, let me break it down for you and tell you exactly which ones are worth your time and which ones are a complete waste of your time. Let's get into it. So, let's start with the first one on the list, Claude 101. Now, this is quite

0:30 a good introduction. It takes you through talking to AI, the desktop app, which is certainly the best way to use Claude if you're new to Claude. It takes you through the basic features like projects and artifacts and skills and it talks about tools and different modes and they don't actually get you to use Claude. They're just telling you about the different features and how it all works. But with that being said, it's still pretty good. If you're new to Claude, it's pretty decent. However, a better approach is simply to download Claude, ask it what its key features are, ask it to explain those key features, ask uh Claude questions about

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