Announcing My First eBook: Build Your First MCP Server

I'm thrilled to announce the release of my first eBook: Build Your First MCP Server: A Developer's Guide to Wrapping Existing APIs for AI Agents to Use!

It's available today for $9.99 on Gumroad. You can get your PDF copy right now.

What This Book Is About

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is revolutionizing how AI agents interact with external APIs. Instead of agents making direct API calls or relying on limited built-in tools, MCP servers act as bridges that transform any API into an AI-accessible powerhouse.

This comprehensive developer's guide takes you from MCP fundamentals to building production-ready servers that AI agents can seamlessly interact with. While there are several types of MCP servers available, this eBook focuses specifically on Stateless Streamable HTTP Remote MCP Servers built with Bun—the lightning-fast JavaScript/TypeScript runtime—using just one dependency (zod) for maximum simplicity and performance.

What You'll Learn

MCP Server Types Overview: Understand the different approaches to building MCP servers and why stateless HTTP remote servers are ideal for wrapping around existing APIs

Authentication Patterns: Learn to handle both static API key authentication and the more complex OAuth 2.0 flow - a critical skill for wrapping real-world APIs

Production Deployment: Use included Dockerfiles to deploy your servers on Render.com or any cloud provider

Featured Projects

The book walks through two complete, real-world examples:

Weather API Integration: Build a clean, efficient weather data MCP server that demonstrates the fundamentals with simple API key authentication

Petfinder API Wrapper: Navigate OAuth2 client credentials flow and complex pet adoption data structures - showing you how to handle enterprise-grade authentication patterns

Each example includes complete source code, detailed explanations, and ready-to-deploy Dockerfile configurations. All code repositories are publicly available for you to experiment with and adapt to your own projects.

Why I Wrote This

As an AI Engineer, I've seen firsthand how powerful MCP can be for connecting AI agents to existing systems. But I noticed there wasn't a bunch of material out there to learn how to build simple MCP servers that wrapped existing APIs, so I wrote this eBook.

This book bridges that gap by providing practical, hands-on examples that you can actually use. Whether you're building internal tools for your company or creating public MCP servers, the patterns and techniques covered here will save you countless hours of trial and error.

Get Your Copy Today

The eBook is available now for $9.99 and you can download your PDF copy immediately after purchase.

Get Build Your First MCP Server on Gumroad →

A Note on Accessibility

Thank you to anyone who purchases this book - your support means the world to me and enables more blog posts and more free open source code on my GitHub and this blog.

If you're not financially able to purchase but would still like to learn, please reach out to me via email at matt@groff.dev and mention this blog post on GroffDev. I'm happy to provide you with a copy.

What's Next

This is just the beginning. I'm already working on more content around AI engineering, MCP servers, and practical AI development techniques. If you found this book valuable, stay tuned for more resources coming soon.

Ready to make your APIs AI-accessible? Let's build your first MCP server together.

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By purchasing this book, you're supporting an independent small business and helping fund more blog posts and free open source code on my GitHub and this blog.