RAG & MCP Fundamentals – A Hands-On Crash Course
freeCodeCamp.org
A crash course in two parts with hands-on labs. The first builds a RAG pipeline step by step, from keyword search and embeddings to a vector database and document chunking, then looks at caching and monitoring in production. The second explains the Model Context Protocol and ends with a custom MCP server and client written with the Python SDK.
What you'll learn
- Keyword search and semantic search with embeddings
- Storing and querying vectors in a vector database
- Chunking documents for better retrieval
- An end-to-end RAG pipeline
- MCP resources, tools and prompts
- Building an MCP server and client in Python
