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The CCA-F Study Guide

Think like a Claude architect, pass the CCA-F first time

This book is 50% completeLast updated on 2026-06-28
Daniel Vaughan

A study guide written against the Claude Certified Architect — Foundations (CCA-F) blueprint. Organised domain-by-domain and weighted to match the exam, it teaches the architectural judgement and anti-pattern recognition the CCA-F rewards, not a feature tour, across Claude Code, the Agent SDK, the Claude API, and MCP.

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About

About

About the Book

The Claude Certified Architect — Foundations (CCA-F) certification validates that you can make sound architectural and trade-off decisions when building production systems with Claude. This book is the focused study companion for that exam.

It teaches the four core technologies the exam tests, Claude Code, the Claude Agent SDK, the Claude API, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), through the same scenario-driven lens the exam uses: customer-support agents, multi-agent research systems, Claude Code in CI/CD, developer-productivity tooling, and structured data extraction. Every chapter maps to the exam's five weighted domains, teaches the architectural judgement each domain rewards, and drills the specific anti-patterns the exam is built to catch, such as parsing natural-language signals to end an agentic loop, or relying on prompt instructions where deterministic enforcement is required.

What makes it unique: it is the first study guide written specifically against the CCA-F blueprint, organised domain-by-domain and weighted to match the exam, and built around transferable architectural reasoning rather than a feature tour. You will learn not just what Claude's agentic stack does but when each pattern is the right choice: the distinction the exam, and production work, actually reward.

Written by Daniel Vaughan, Head of Forward Deployed Engineering at HCLTech AI Labs and author of Cloud Native Development with Google Cloud (O'Reilly), who architects and ships production Claude systems daily across the exact stack the CCA-F tests.

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About the Author

Daniel Vaughan

Daniel Vaughan is a technology leader and software architect based in the United Kingdom, specialising in agentic AI. He has spent approaching thirty years across enterprise, startup, and academic settings, with a career-long focus on engineering quality and developer productivity. His work now centres on the shift where AI stops being an experiment and becomes core to how organisations build software.

Daniel is Head of Forward Deployed Engineering at HCLTech AI Labs, where he leads a global practice embedding engineers and coding agents inside complex enterprise environments to take production AI from prototype to live systems. He built the practice from the ground up, running lean regional pods in which a shared architect, a small number of engineers, and a team of agents working through tools such as Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot deliver at the output of a much larger team.

Before HCLTech AI Labs, Daniel was director of software engineering at Mastercard in London, leading cloud strategy and architecture for real-time payment products in a highly regulated financial services environment. Earlier, he spent eight years at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, moving from software engineer into engineering leadership, working on the same problems of software quality and developer productivity that he now solves with agentic tooling.

He is the author of Cloud Native Development with Google Cloud (O'Reilly, 2024) and Ext GWT 2.0: Beginner's Guide (Packt, 2010), a Google Developer Expert, and a Green Software Champion. He writes about agentic engineering and AI-assisted development at blog.danielvaughan.com.

The Leanpub Podcast

Episode 329

An Interview with Daniel Vaughan

Contents

Table of Contents

Copyright

About the Author

Introduction

  1. The Exam Is a Judgement Test
  2. Who This Book Is For
  3. What This Book Covers, and What It Does Not
  4. How to Use This Book

Chapter 1. Foundations: The Exam, the Stack, and the Scenarios

  1. Learning Objectives
  2. What the Certification Validates
  3. The Shape of the Exam
  4. The Five Domains and Their Weightings
  5. What “Architectural Judgement” Means
  6. The Core Stack
  7. The Production Scenarios
  8. How to Study with This Book
  9. Summary
  10. Review Questions

Chapter 2. Agentic Architecture and Orchestration

  1. Learning Objectives
  2. The Agentic Loop
  3. Coordinator-Subagent Orchestration
  4. Subagent Invocation and Context Isolation
  5. Multi-Step Workflows: Enforcement and Handoff
  6. Hooks for Deterministic Enforcement
  7. Task Decomposition
  8. Session State, Resumption, and Forking
  9. Summary
  10. Review Questions

Chapter 3. Tool Design and MCP Integration

  1. Learning Objectives
  2. The Anatomy of a Tool
  3. The Description Is the Interface
  4. Single Responsibility and Schema Guardrails
  5. Built-In Tools and the Exploration Pattern
  6. Structured Errors and Tool Reliability
  7. The Model Context Protocol
  8. Summary
  9. Review Questions

Chapter 4. Claude Code Configuration and Workflows

  1. Learning Objectives
  2. The CLAUDE.md Hierarchy
  3. Skills, Slash Commands, and Plan Mode
  4. Claude Code in CI/CD
  5. Summary
  6. Review Questions

Chapter 5. Prompt Engineering and Structured Output

  1. Learning Objectives
  2. Explicit Criteria and False Positives
  3. Few-Shot, Reasoning, and the Priority Order
  4. Structured Output
  5. Extraction Patterns
  6. Match the Fix to the Failure
  7. Summary
  8. Review Questions

Chapter 6. Context Management and Reliability

  1. Learning Objectives
  2. The Context Window as Working Memory
  3. Trimming, Summarisation, and Persistence
  4. Reliability: Errors, Recovery, and Escalation
  5. Summary
  6. Review Questions

Conclusion: Exam-Day Readiness

  1. A Domain-by-Domain Readiness Check
  2. Exam-Day Strategy
  3. A Final Word on Judgement

Appendix A: Answers to the Review Questions

  1. Chapter 1. Foundations
  2. Chapter 2. Agentic Architecture and Orchestration
  3. Chapter 3. Tool Design and MCP Integration
  4. Chapter 4. Claude Code Configuration and Workflows
  5. Chapter 5. Prompt Engineering and Structured Output
  6. Chapter 6. Context Management and Reliability

Appendix B: Glossary

Appendix C: List of Tables

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