Learn / Courses

Learn to build with and buy AI

45 courses, guides and books for understanding LLMs, prompt and context engineering, agents and evaluation, picked for engineers and the people who buy AI.

Free or official material first; every link checked by hand and reviewed quarterly. Last verified October 27, 2026.

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Busy engineer

From how a model predicts tokens to agents you can measure.

Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPTAndrej Karpathy · 3.5 h
Prompt engineering overview and best practicesAnthropic · 2 h
Building effective agentsAnthropic · 30 min
AI Agents CourseHugging Face · 30 h
AI Evals: Everything You Need to Know (FAQ)Hamel Husain & Shreya Shankar · 2 h

Manager or founder

What the tools do, where they fail, and how to judge them.

How I use LLMsAndrej Karpathy · 2 h
AI Fluency: Framework & FoundationsAnthropic Academy · 3 h
Generative AI for EveryoneDeepLearning.AI (Andrew Ng) · 5 h
Building effective agentsAnthropic · 30 min
AI Evals: Everything You Need to Know (FAQ)Hamel Husain & Shreya Shankar · 2 h

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Every course, grouped by what it teaches.

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How LLMs work

Neural Networks: Zero to Hero
Andrej Karpathy
Build backprop, a language model and a GPT tokenizer in code, so 'next-token prediction' stops being a slogan.
- Intermediate
- Video
- 25 h
- Free
- English
Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT
Andrej Karpathy
The full pipeline from pretraining data to RLHF and reasoning models in one sitting, with no code required.
- Beginner
- Video
- 3.5 h
- Free
- English
Neural Networks (incl. Transformers and Attention chapters)
3Blue1Brown
The clearest visual intuition for gradient descent, embeddings and attention available anywhere.
- Beginner
- Video
- 3 h
- Free
- English
CS224N: Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning
Stanford University
The university-grade NLP course behind most of today's LLM vocabulary, refreshed every winter.
- Advanced
- Video
- 80 h
- Free
- English
CS336: Language Modeling from Scratch
Stanford University
Train a language model end to end yourself (tokenizer, kernels, scaling, data, alignment), the most rigorous public path into how frontier labs work.
- Advanced
- Interactive
- 150 h
- Free
- English
LLM Course
Hugging Face
Hands-on work with open models, from Transformers basics to fine-tuning and a new chapter on building reasoning models.
- Intermediate
- Interactive
- 40 h
- Free
- English
Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch): code repository
Sebastian Raschka
A readable, step-by-step build of a GPT-style model in PyTorch, with actively maintained notebooks and bonus material.
- Intermediate
- Book
- 40 h
- Free core
- English
Transformer Explainer
Georgia Tech Polo Club
Run a real GPT-2 in the browser and watch each step of attention, which is the fastest way to see what a transformer does.
- Beginner
- Interactive
- 30 min
- Free
- English

Prompt & context engineering

Prompt engineering overview and best practices
Anthropic
Vendor-maintained guidance with per-model pages for the current Claude generation.
- Beginner
- Text
- 2 h
- Free
- English
Prompt Engineering Interactive Tutorial
Anthropic
Nine notebook chapters with exercises that teach prompt structure by doing rather than reading.
- Beginner
- Interactive
- 4 h
- Free
- English
Prompt engineering guide
OpenAI
OpenAI's own rules for prompting current GPT and reasoning models, including how to set reasoning effort.
- Beginner
- Text
- 1 h
- Free
- English
OpenAI Cookbook
OpenAI
Runnable recipes plus model-specific prompting guides, updated almost daily.
- Intermediate
- Interactive
- 10 h
- Free
- English
Prompt design strategies
Google
Google's maintained prompting reference for Gemini, useful for writing prompts that work across vendors.
- Beginner
- Text
- 1 h
- Free
- English
ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers
DeepLearning.AI + OpenAI
The classic short starter on calling an LLM from code, still maintained and quick to finish.
- Beginner
- Video
- 1.7 h
- Free
- English
Effective context engineering for AI agents
Anthropic
Explains why agent quality now depends on what goes into the context window, not on clever wording.
- Intermediate
- Text
- 30 min
- Free
- English
Context Engineering
DeepLearning.AI + Chroma
A full course on pruning, compaction, scratchpads and agent memory, the practical side of context engineering.
- Intermediate
- Video
- 19 h
- Paid
- English

Agents & MCP

AI Agents Course
Hugging Face
Framework-neutral agent fundamentals followed by hands-on units in several frameworks, with a free certificate.
- Intermediate
- Interactive
- 30 h
- Free
- English
MCP Course
Hugging Face + Anthropic
Build and connect MCP servers and clients step by step.
- Intermediate
- Interactive
- 10 h
- Free
- English
Model Context Protocol documentation and specification
MCP project
The primary source for the protocol that connects agents to tools and data, versioned by spec date.
- Intermediate
- Text
- 3 h
- Free
- English
Building with the Claude API
Anthropic Academy
Covers the whole path from the first API call to tool use, RAG and agent workflows.
- Intermediate
- Video
- 8 h
- Free
- English
Introduction to Model Context Protocol (+ Advanced Topics)
Anthropic Academy
A short official course from the creators of MCP, with an advanced follow-up.
- Intermediate
- Video
- 3 h
- Free
- English
Claude Code in Action (+ Agent Skills, Subagents)
Anthropic Academy
Shows how to steer, configure and verify long agentic coding sessions, the most common way engineers now work with agents.
- Intermediate
- Video
- 3 h
- Free
- English
Building effective agents
Anthropic
The most cited short essay on when to use workflows instead of agents, and which patterns hold up.
- Intermediate
- Text
- 30 min
- Free
- English
Agentic AI
DeepLearning.AI (Andrew Ng)
Teaches the four core agent patterns (reflection, tool use, planning, multi-agent) together with how to evaluate them.
- Intermediate
- Video
- 10 h
- Paid
- English
LangChain Academy (LangGraph, Deep Agents, LangSmith)
LangChain
Free official courses on stateful, long-running agents and how to observe them.
- Intermediate
- Video
- 10 h
- Free
- English
A practical guide to building agents + Agents SDK docs
OpenAI
OpenAI's design guide to agent components, orchestration and guardrails, paired with its Agents SDK (openai.github.io/openai-agents-python).
- Intermediate
- Text
- 2 h
- Free
- English
AI Agents for Beginners
Microsoft
An MIT-licensed lesson series on agent design patterns, tool use, RAG and trustworthy agents, updated weekly.
- Beginner
- Interactive
- 15 h
- Free
- English

Evals, RAG & production

AI Evals: Everything You Need to Know (FAQ)
Hamel Husain & Shreya Shankar
Practical, opinionated answers on error analysis, LLM-as-judge and evaluating RAG and agents, from the most-cited evals teachers.
- Intermediate
- Text
- 2 h
- Free
- English
AI Evals For Engineers & PMs
Parlance Labs (Maven)
The paid, cohort-based deep version of the evals method, aimed at teams that ship LLM products.
- Intermediate
- Video
- 30 h
- Paid
- English
AI Engineering (book) + companion resources
Chip Huyen / O'Reilly
The standard book on building with foundation models, covering evaluation, RAG, agents, fine-tuning and inference cost.
- Intermediate
- Book
- 20 h
- Free core
- English
What We've Learned From A Year of Building with LLMs
Yan, Bischof, Frye, Husain, Liu, Shankar
Tactical, operational and strategic lessons from practitioners, dated 2024 but still the best single production checklist.
- Intermediate
- Text
- 2 h
- Free
- English
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
DeepLearning.AI
A full course on retrieval, vector search, evaluation and production RAG, last updated in 2026.
- Intermediate
- Video
- 26 h
- Paid
- English
Evaluating AI Agents
DeepLearning.AI + Arize
A short, hands-on introduction to tracing and scoring agent trajectories.
- Beginner
- Video
- 2.6 h
- Free
- English

For leaders

How I use LLMs
Andrej Karpathy
A practitioner's tour of what today's assistants can actually do, with no code, ideal for non-engineers.
- Beginner
- Video
- 2 h
- Free
- English
Elements of AI
University of Helsinki & MinnaLearn
A free, vendor-neutral introduction to AI concepts and limits, taken by more than 2 million people.
- Beginner
- Interactive
- 30 h
- Free
- English
Generative AI for Everyone
DeepLearning.AI (Andrew Ng)
Helps managers judge which tasks generative AI can take on and how to scope projects around it.
- Beginner
- Video
- 5 h
- Paid
- English
Google AI Essentials
Google (Coursera)
Applied prompting and responsible use for everyday work in under 10 hours, with a recognisable certificate.
- Beginner
- Video
- 10 h
- Paid
- English
AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations
Anthropic Academy
A vendor-neutral framework for delegating to and working with AI effectively and safely, with role-specific follow-ups.
- Beginner
- Video
- 3 h
- Free
- English
OpenAI Academy
OpenAI
Free courses and live events on using ChatGPT at work, organised by role and sector.
- Beginner
- Video
- 5 h
- Free
- English

In Russian

Machine Learning Handbook (YSDA, in Russian)
Yandex School of Data Analysis
The strongest free Russian-language ML textbook, covering classical ML through transformers.
- Intermediate
- Text
- 40 h
- Free
- Russian
NLP Course (YSDA)
Yandex School of Data Analysis
YSDA's open NLP course with notebooks and assignments, active in 2026.
- Advanced
- Interactive
- 60 h
- Free
- English / Russian
Deep Learning School, semester 1 (autumn 2026)
MIPT Deep Learning School (Stepik)
A free university-level deep learning course in Russian, run every semester.
- Intermediate
- Video
- 60 h
- Free
- Russian
Deep Learning School, semester 2: NLP (autumn 2026)
MIPT Deep Learning School (Stepik)
The NLP and language-model follow-up to semester 1, also free and current.
- Intermediate
- Video
- 60 h
- Free
- Russian
Inside LLMs: how ChatGPT thinks (in Russian)
HSE University, Faculty of Computer Science (Stepik)
A gentle Russian-language explanation of how LLMs work, from an HSE master's programme team.
- Beginner
- Interactive
- 10 h
- Free
- Russian
Introduction to building AI agents (in Russian)
Stepik (independent author)
Seven labs on calling LLMs from Python and building function-calling agents with LangGraph.
- Beginner
- Interactive
- 15 h
- Free
- Russian