Building Production MCP Servers: A Practical Guide to Shipping Tools for AI Agents

The guide the SDK docs don't write. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is how you give AI agents such as Claude and Cursor real tools, data, and APIs. Standing up a hello-world server takes ten minutes. Shipping one that survives real traffic, malformed inputs, slow networks, and untrusted callers is a different job entirely. This book is the missing manual for that gap. In twelve focused, code-heavy chapters you will learn the shape of a server that scales: what MCP actually is and why it matters now, the first-server structure that grows without rewrites, tools done right with schemas and validation, the stdout rule and other silent killers, network tools with timeouts and size caps, resources and prompts, HTTP transport and remote servers, auth and security, testing with the Inspector, packaging and distribution, and a production shipping checklist. Written for developers who want to expose their tools, data, and APIs to AI agents without fighting boilerplate or learning every footgun the hard way. Evergreen, practical, and dense with working code.