Claude Code, from zero to daily driver
The Beginner course. Install and sign in, decide what the agent may do without asking, take one change from request to commit, keep a long session from wandering, and leave the project a memory. Five lessons, a capstone, three electives — an afternoon. About 30 minutes of reading, and every lesson ends with an exercise you run in your own repo.
The course at a glance
Claude Code is where our working day actually happens: the site you are reading ships through agent sessions like the ones this course teaches, under a delivery board that reviews every change. Most tutorials teach the commands. We would rather teach the operating habits — the commands change, and the habits are why an agent’s work survives contact with a real codebase.
The Beginner level is one session and one change. Each lesson is twenty minutes of reading and one exercise in a repository you don’t mind experimenting on; the capstone puts the whole level together — a reported bug, planned, fixed with a failing test written first, and committed.
You are ready if you can work in a terminal (change folders, run commands, read output) and use git at the level of clone, commit, git status and git diff. You need a Claude subscription — Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise; the free plan does not include Claude Code — or a Console account, or a supported cloud provider. Lesson 1 walks the sign-in.
The three installments
One course in three levels, each level exiting into the next — all three live. Beginner is below; Intermediate shapes the project around your sessions; Advanced takes the setup beyond one developer.
Beginner
Install and sign in, permission modes and plan mode, one change from request to commit, keeping a session on track, project memory with CLAUDE.md. Five lessons, a capstone, three electives.
Intermediate
Skills, hooks, subagents, MCP and plugins — the one-developer setup, where the project starts enforcing the rules CLAUDE.md can only suggest. The Beginner exit checklist is the entry test.
Advanced
Claude Code beyond one developer — parallel sessions in worktrees, orchestration patterns, dynamic workflows, headless scripting with claude -p, GitHub Actions, a setup the team shares, and bounded autonomous runs. Seven lessons and a capstone.
The lessons
In order, each one building on the last; the capstone uses all five.
Install, sign in, and look around
Before you trust a session, know three things about it: the version, the model, and the account. Lesson 1 gets you there in twenty minutes.
Permission modes and plan mode
A permission mode decides what Claude may do without asking. Learn the four, switch mid-session, and build the one habit that keeps agent work cheap to trust: plan before edit.
Your first change, from request to commit
Asking for a change and accepting whatever comes back is how sessions go wrong. This lesson is the whole discipline in one pass — ending in a commit, the only artifact that counts.
Keep a session on track
Everything in a session — your prompts, Claude’s replies, every file it read — sits in a finite context window. Long sessions drift unless you steer. Five commands are the wheel and the pedals.
Project memory with CLAUDE.md
Every session starts with amnesia. A short CLAUDE.md at the project root is the cure — and the seed of everything the next installment automates.
No walkthrough this time. The steps say what to do; you choose the prompts. That is the point: the habits hold without the script.
Electives
Optional, standalone, fifteen to twenty minutes each — useful the day you need them.
Elective: Claude Code in your editor
The terminal is not the only home. Two editor integrations put Claude Code next to your code — and the review loop gets tighter when the diff is a pane away.
Elective: give Claude a screenshot
An error message, a broken layout, a design mockup — half of what lands on a developer’s desk arrives as pixels. Claude Code reads images, and three input paths cover every case.
Elective: learn from Claude Code itself
Before you ask the internet how Claude Code works, ask Claude Code. Three teachers ship in the box — and one of them makes you a better developer rather than a faster one.
The Beginner exit
The capstone checks what files and git can see; you tick the rest, honestly. Every line below is the entry test for installment 2 — Intermediate, on skills, hooks, subagents, MCP and plugins.
Sources and attribution
This course is our adaptation of Wesam Abousaid’s open curriculum Claude Code: Everything You Need to Know (v2026.10), used under its MIT license. The lesson spine, the exercise pattern and the capstone design are his; the phrasing, the opinions and the field notes from daily agent delivery are ours. Facts are stated as the official Claude Code documentation states them at the verified version above.
We are not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic — we just spend our days in this tool and think it deserves a better on-ramp. If you want the automated per-lesson checks and the purpose-built practice repo, use the upstream template.