Claude Certified Architect – Professional Study Guide
Production Architecture, Integration, Evaluation, Governance, and Lifecycle Decisions for CCAR-P
Architecture judgement for the Claude Certified Architect – Professional exam: all seven domains, 304 chapter questions and a 63-item mock exam.
- Author
- Srinivas Bommena
- Edition
- Second Edition
- Published
- July 2026
- Formats
- Kindle
- Length
- 871 pages
About this book
Claude Certified Architect – Professional Study Guide, Second Edition (October 2026) is designed for developers, architects and technical leaders who want to develop the judgement required to design production-grade AI systems.
The book covers all seven domains of the Claude Certified Architect – Professional exam, but its focus is not feature memorisation. Readers work through architecture decisions involving model selection, prompting, context engineering, tool use, MCP, agents, retrieval, evaluation, security, governance, lifecycle management and Claude Code.
The Architecture Decision Lab, the DECIDE-7 method, enterprise case studies and a consequence-led decision model sit at the centre of the book. They help readers answer a more important question than “Which feature should I use?”, namely: which architecture is defensible under the stated business, technical, security and operational constraints?
What the Second Edition adds
- Claude platform mechanics: model selection connected to capability, reasoning effort, latency, cost, routing and fallback; tool use including client and server execution, strict schemas, stop_reason, pause_turn, failure semantics and runtime authorisation boundaries.
- MCP as an architecture boundary: host, client and server responsibilities, tools/resources/prompts, stdio and Streamable HTTP, discovery, authentication, authorisation and protocol versions.
- Claude Code in production: CLAUDE.md, imports, path-scoped rules, settings scopes, permission ordering, hooks, Skills, subagents, headless execution, CI/CD and MCP configuration.
- Regulation translated into architecture: GDPR, HIPAA and FedRAMP mapped to data flows, identity, retention, human oversight, evidence and production controls.
- Stronger assessment: 304 chapter questions and a 63-item full mock exam, plus part-end Architecture Review Board dossiers, decision records and reusable checklists.
The objective is not only to help you pass the exam. It is to give you a working mental model of Claude architecture that stays useful as models, tools and platform capabilities evolve.
An independent study guide, not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic.
