You saved the Claude links. The docs, the free courses, the cookbook, the essay everyone shares.
Then you opened almost none of them. It's easy to blame your discipline for that.
It was never discipline.
Nobody ever handed you the order.
Fourteen tabs with no sequence and no opinion read like homework. So they stay closed.
The 14, sorted
This week I published the full list on my Substack.
Fourteen free, official sources, each with a note on when to open it and when to skip it.
Every link is Anthropic's own. Nothing is gated, and nothing is an affiliate link.
There are three ways through the list. Pick one route and ignore the other two.
Your first week with Claude
Go 2, then 1, then 10. Take a free course, learn where the docs live, then learn what support covers when something breaks.
You are building something
Go 8, then 4, then 6, then 5. Read Building effective agents, then the cookbook, then the Claude Code repo, then the official skills library.
You are rolling Claude out to a team
Go 2, then 10, then 12, then 3. Courses give your people a finish line. Support answers what they will ask you.
The newsroom keeps you ahead of them, and Claude Academy shows them what to take next.
The three I reopen
- 1. The docs. When a post and the docs disagree, the docs win.
- 4. The cookbook. Working code beats reading about it.
- 9. Claude Code best practices. Watch someone competent use the tool.
One more decision: which model
The second guide answers the question every link raises next.
Opus 5.5 costs 40 percent of Fable 5.1's price per token, and Anthropic says it performs at Fable 5.1's level on most work.
Start on Opus 5.5. It defaults to medium effort, not high, so check that setting before you judge it.
Move to Fable 5.1 only when your own tests on Opus 5.5 at higher effort still fall short.
Both guides, free
The Claude starter vault: ericmelillo.substack.com/p/claude-starter-vault
The model and effort picker: ericmelillo.substack.com/p/claude-model-and-effort-picker
Open number 2 this weekend. It's the one every route starts with.
This issue is the short route. The expanded editions carry all fourteen links, the note on when to skip each one, and the full model comparison.