Claude Certified Architect Foundations Playbook

You opened the CCA-F syllabus. Now you can't find a single trustworthy study guide.



You found scattered Reddit threads, thin online guides, and giant 460-page bricks that explain AI basics instead of preparing you for the exam you actually have to pass.



This book gives you a 30-day CCA-F study system built around scenarios, architecture, and real prep artifacts. By Chapter 1 you know your weakest domain. By Day 9 you have a working multi-agent coordinator with structured citations and fallback loops. By Day 12 you have a portable MCP setup that survives a teammate clone. By Day 15 you understand the real CLAUDE.md hierarchy, slash commands, hooks, and scope traps. By Day 19 you have a structured-output extractor tested across 20 trials. By Day 25 you have silent-failure detection and trust-enforcement patterns you can defend in an architect interview. By Day 30 you take a 60-question scenario mock and score yourself domain by domain.



This is not trivia prep. The CCA-F is a scenario-based architect exam. The questions ask whether you can recognize the right system design under pressure: when to use Batch, how to scope MCP tools, where CLAUDE.md rules belong, how structured outputs prevent malformed JSON, why silent failures slip past schemas, and why full database access is a blast-radius problem.



The drills, the 30-day plan and all 8 build projects come as a free companion GitHub repo: the study half runs the moment you download it, with no account and no API key, and the 60-question mock ships with a scorer that grades you domain by domain.


Inside, you'll get:


1. A domain-weighted 30-day study path for the CCA-F exam.


2. The 5 judgment patterns that show up again and again in scenario questions.


3. A Hub-and-Spoke multi-agent coordinator pattern with structured citations and refusal paths.


4. MCP portability rules for configs, env vars, tool naming, and teammate-clone failures.


5. Claude Code configuration prep: CLAUDE.md scopes, slash commands, hooks, skills, and custom subagents.


6. Structured-output patterns with schema validation, Pydantic post-validation, and fallback loops.


7. Silent-failure detection with assertions, golden-set regression, and LLM-as-judge review.


8. Safety and trust architecture: least-privilege MCP access, operator/user boundaries, audit logging, and prompt-injection defenses.


9. A 60-question scenario mock exam weighted across all 5 domains.


10. A practical cert-positioning chapter that shows how to pair the badge with visible prep projects instead of pretending the cert is magic.



The shelf is filling up with low-effort CCA-F books. This one is different: dense, scenario-driven prep with a 30-day execution path and concrete artifacts you can explain after the exam.



Scroll up and grab your copy.