Model Context Protocol Fundamentals
A developer-focused foundation for understanding MCP before you build servers, clients, tools, and production integrations. Updated for the 2026-07-28 specification.
What you will understand
By the end of this module you should be able to explain where MCP fits in an agent architecture, how a host coordinates one or more clients and servers, what a server actually exposes, how transport and JSON-RPC relate to the protocol, and how the modern stateless MCP core changes older assumptions about handshakes and long-lived sessions.
Important: MCP changes quickly. This module is written against the 2026-07-28 specification, which introduced a stateless core, cacheable list results, header-based routing, Multi Round-Trip Requests, authorization hardening, and a formal extensions framework.