[{"_1":2,"_3":-5,"_4":-5},"loaderData",{"_5":6,"_7":8},"actionData","errors","root",{"_28":-5,"_38":-5,"_39":40,"_41":42,"_43":44,"_45":46,"_47":48,"_49":50,"_51":52,"_53":54,"_55":56,"_57":58},"routes/_store+/_readers+/email_author.$slug/route",{"_9":10,"_11":-5},"book",{"_12":13,"_14":15,"_16":17,"_18":19,"_20":21,"_22":23},"currentUser","id","Z2lkOi8vbGVhbnB1Yi9TdG9yZTo6Qm9va1Byb2R1Y3QvODA0MTA","title","The Claude Certified Architect Study Guide","state","published","contactAuthorMethod","email","aboutText","

The Claude Certified Architect credentials, Foundations (CCAR-F) and the Professional exam (CCAR-P) that builds on it, validate that you can make sound architectural and trade-off decisions when building and operating production systems with Claude. This book is the focused study companion for both exams, in two parts you can read straight through or sit one at a time.

Part I covers the Foundations 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.

Part II covers the Professional exam. It assumes the Foundations stack rather than re-teaching it, and puts that stack to work under the competing cost, latency, compliance, and lifecycle constraints of a system someone has to operate. Its seven domains span solution design, model and context engineering, integration, evaluation and testing, governance and risk, stakeholder communication and lifecycle, and developer productivity: the judgement that designing, operating, and governing a production Claude system demands.

What makes it distinctive: it is a study guide written specifically against the CCAR blueprints, organised domain-by-domain and weighted to match each 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 exams, and production work, reward.

Written by Daniel Vaughan, author of Cloud Native Development with Google Cloud (O'Reilly), who architects and ships production Claude systems daily across the exact stack the CCAR exams test.

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Kick off your book project, get started with GhostAI, get better at marketing, or spend the day doing all three! Free live workshops on Zoom. Saturday, June 27, 2026.

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