Model Context Protocol Guide

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard released by Anthropic that solves the M×N integration problem for AI applications by providing a unified client-server protocol (JSON-RPC 2.0) for connecting LLMs to external tools, databases, and APIs. The guide covers MCP's three core primitives (tools, resources, prompts), its architecture with host/client/server roles, and two transport modes (stdio and HTTP). A hands-on Python tutorial walks through building a weather MCP server using the FastMCP SDK, configuring it in Claude Desktop, and testing with the MCP Inspector. The guide also covers real-world use cases in developer tooling and enterprise workflows, an implementation checklist, common pitfalls like vague tool descriptions and missing error handling, and the protocol's roadmap including OAuth 2.1 auth and streamable HTTP transport.