Second Edition · October 2026. The definitive guide to Claude Code — from zero to mastery. For everyone, no prior coding experience required.
This handbook is organized as three standalone books. Read in order, or jump to what you need. Coming from the first edition? Start with What's New in the Second Edition.
For everyone — no programming experience required.
Takes you from "what is a terminal?" to building your first real project with Claude Code.
For developers ready to unlock the full power.
Skills, plugins and mods, subagents, the agent view, worktrees, hooks, MCP or CLI, agents that see, context engineering, limits and caching.
For those building system-level AI workflows.
Harness engineering, verification and evals, orchestrating many agents, agents checking agents, routines, cloud agents, containment, measured cost, portability, and the builder's job now.
Joey Yu — Developer and heavy Claude Code user. Built 50+ projects with Claude Code including AI tools, optimization systems, and quant trading platforms. The first edition was based on 7 weeks of intensive usage consuming $3,400+ in API-equivalent tokens.