Everyone wants to build AI agents. Almost nobody has a reading list. They watch one YouTube video, skim a Twitter thread, then wonder why their agent falls apart the moment it needs to plan, use a tool, or remember anything. Here's the resource list I wish someone had handed me on day one. Every link, organized by what it actually teaches. Save this one. **VIDEOS** 1. LLM Introduction: 2. LLMs from Scratch: 3. Agentic AI Overview (Stanford): 4. Building and Evaluating Agents: 5. Building Effective Agents: 6. Building Agents with MCP: 7. Building an Agent from Scratch: 8. Philo Agents (playlist): **REPOS** 1. GenAI Agents: 2. Microsoft's AI Agents for Beginners: 3. Prompt Engineering Guide: 4. Hands-On Large Language Models: 5. GenAI Agents (alt link): 6. Made with ML: 7. Hands-On AI Engineering: 8. Awesome Generative AI Guide: 9. Designing Machine Learning Systems: 10. Machine Learning for Beginners (Microsoft): 11. LLM Course: **GUIDES** 1. Google's Agent Whitepaper: 2. Google's Agent Companion: 3. Building Effective Agents (Anthropic): 4. Claude Code Best Agentic Coding Practices: 5. OpenAI's Practical Guide to Building Agents: **BOOKS** 1. Understanding Deep Learning: 2. Building an LLM from Scratch: 3. The LLM Engineering Handbook: 4. AI Agents: The Definitive Guide — Nicole Koenigstein: 5. Building Applications with AI Agents — Michael Albada: 6. AI Agents with MCP — Kyle Stratis: 7. AI Engineering (O'Reilly): **PAPERS** 1. ReAct: 2. Generative Agents: 3. Toolformer: 4. Chain-of-Thought Prompting: 5. Tree of Thoughts: 6. Reflexion: 7. Retrieval-Augmented Generation Survey: **COURSES** 1. HuggingFace's Agent Course: 2. Build with Anthropic: I'm not telling you to go through all 39 links this weekend. Start with the Stanford overview, then Anthropic's "Building Effective Agents" guide, then ReAct. That sequence alone will teach you more about how agents actually work than most paid courses. Save this post. You'll want it back in three weeks when you're stuck debugging why your agent keeps calling the wrong tool. Repost if this saved you an afternoon of searching. P.S. Which one are you starting with?