Learn to spot fragile Claude designs, choose the right control, tool, or workflow, and make decisions that hold up under real production constraints

Key Features

• Cover both CCAR-F and CCAR-P through a domain-weighted study path aligned to exam priorities.
• Compare sound architecture choices with realistic anti-patterns, trade-offs, and failure modes.
• Work through cases using Claude API, Agent SDK, Claude Code, MCP, hooks, and subagents.

Book Description

Building with Claude is one thing; choosing the right architecture under competing constraints is another. This guide covers the full Claude Certified Architect journey, from Foundations through Professional, showing how the Claude API, Agent SDK, Claude Code, and MCP fit into production systems.

The Foundations section develops agentic architecture, subagent orchestration, tool design, structured output, Claude Code configuration, context management, and reliability. The Professional section expands into solution design, model and context engineering, integration, RAG, evaluation, monitoring, safety, governance, stakeholder communication, lifecycle management, and developer productivity.

Along the way, you will work through design choices involving cost, latency, security, failure handling, human review, CI/CD, and operational controls. The result is not just exam familiarity, but a structured understanding of how Claude systems are designed, operated, and governed in practice.

What you will learn

• Choose between loops, pipelines, and multi-agent patterns
• Scope tools, subagents, permissions, and context correctly
• Configure Claude Code with skills, hooks, and project rules
• Design secure MCP and retrieval integrations
• Test tool trajectories and route cases to human review
• Diagnose cost, latency, reliability, and drift problems
• Apply safety, compliance, and governance controls
• Plan team rollout, CI/CD, and lifecycle management

Who this book is for

For solution architects, senior or staff engineers, AI engineers, and technical leads with hands-on Claude experience. Readers should be comfortable reading Python or TypeScript, calling an LLM API, working with tool use, and experimenting with Claude Code or the Agent SDK.

Table of Contents

1. Foundations: The Exam, the Stack and the Scenarios
2. Agentic Architecture and Orchestration
3. Tool Design and MCP Integration
4. Claude Code Configuration and Workflows
5. Prompt Engineering and Structured Output
6. Context Management and Reliability
7. The Professional Exam and the Architect's Remit
8. Solution Design & Architecture
9. Claude Models, Prompting & Context Engineering
10. Integration
11. Evaluation & Testing
12. Diagnosis, Optimisation & Monitoring
13. Guardrails, Safety & Risk
14. Compliance, Ethics & Governance
15. Stakeholder Communication & Lifecycle Management
16. Developer Productivity & Operational Enablement

About the Author

Daniel Vaughan is Programme Director at HCLTech AI Labs, where he works across enterprise delivery, research, and engineering teams. He uses Codex CLI across production codebases, greenfield projects, CI pipelines, and local development, bringing a practitioner's view of agentic engineering to this book.