MCP

1. Architecture

   Hosts, clients and servers, one client per server connection, JSON-RPC 2.0 messages, design principles and capability layering.

2. Base protocol

   JSON-RPC requests, responses and notifications, message format, _meta fields, protocol structure.

3. Lifecycle and capability negotiation

   initialize handshake, protocol version negotiation, capability negotiation, session shutdown and timeouts.

4. Versioning and compatibility

   Date-based protocol revisions, backward compatibility, version negotiation.

5. Transports

   Transport layer overview: stdio and Streamable HTTP, message framing, choosing a transport.

6. stdio transport

   Local servers as subprocesses, newline-delimited JSON-RPC over stdin/stdout, logging to stderr.

7. Streamable HTTP transport

   HTTP POST/GET endpoint, SSE streaming responses, session IDs, resumability, origin validation.

8. Tools

   Server-exposed tools: tools/list and tools/call, input/output JSON schema, annotations, structured results, tool errors.

9. Resources

   Resources identified by URI, resources/list and read, templates, subscriptions and update notifications, MIME types.

10. Prompts

    Reusable prompt templates with arguments, prompts/list and prompts/get, user-controlled slash-command style workflows.

11. Pagination and utilities

    Cursor-based pagination for list operations, plus completion, logging and caching utilities.

12. Progress, cancellation and subscriptions

    Progress notifications with progress tokens, request cancellation, long-running operations, subscriptions to changes.

13. Roots

    Client-provided filesystem roots that scope where servers may operate.

14. Sampling

    Servers requesting LLM completions through the client, model preferences, human-in-the-loop approval.

15. Elicitation

    Servers requesting structured user input mid-operation, form schemas, accept/decline/cancel responses.

16. Authorization

    OAuth 2.1-based authorization for HTTP transports, protected resource metadata, authorization server discovery, PKCE, tokens and scopes.

17. Authorization security considerations

    Token audience binding, confused deputy, token passthrough prohibition, redirect URI validation.

18. Building servers and clients

    Implementing an MCP server and client with SDKs, tool definitions, testing with the MCP Inspector, debugging.

Each section links to the official page. Titles and summaries by Extra Credit; the docs belong to their authors.