Skilljar is a learning management system that hosts our educational content. You're logging into it to access the Anthropic course materials. This separate platform allows us to provide interactive learning experiences, track your progress, and ensure you have access to all course resources in an organized way.
MSO Foundations
Course 1 of 5 in Claude Certified Developer - Foundations Prep Course
Learn the model fundamentals and technical foundations the rest of the Developer Foundations course builds on.
Before writing a line of code that calls Claude, it helps to know what the right vocabulary is and why they matter for production. This module covers how the context window behaves under load, why non-determinism changes how you test, and how model choice and reasoning mode compound into cost and quality decisions that are hard to reverse later. It closes with the technical access layer: SDKs, REST, streaming, and async patterns.
Learning objectives
By the end of this module, you will be able to:
- Explain what a token is, how the context window works as a fixed budget, why sampling makes outputs vary, and what non-determinism means for testing and evals
- Describe the Claude model family and its capability tiers, and distinguish choosing a model from enabling a reasoning mode such as extended thinking
- Choose between zero-shot, one-shot, and multi-shot prompting, and weigh the cost and quality trade-off of adding examples
- Describe how a developer accesses Claude: SDK versus raw REST, synchronous versus streaming responses, and asynchronous patterns for high-volume work