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CCAR-F study guide · 5 domains · 30 lessons · free, no sign-up
CCAR-F Study Guide: every domain of the Claude Certified Architect exam, explained
Free, plain-English study guide for the Claude Certified Architect - Foundations (CCAR-F) exam: 30 lessons mapped to the official task statements, plus practice.
An independent community resource - not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic. The lessons follow the task statements of the official CCAR-F exam guide (Version 1.0, effective July 2026); the practice questions are written from scratch and none come from a real exam.
Start with lesson 1.1 → Read the exam guide first
The exam at a glance
What this guide is
The Claude Certified Architect - Foundations exam (CCAR-F) is built from the official exam guide's 30 task statements, grouped into five domains. This study guide has one lesson for each of them, in the same order, so you can read it front to back or jump to the domain your score report says is weak.
Every lesson is built the same way. It starts with the problem, in everyday terms, before any jargon. It then teaches the mechanism one idea at a time, following a single realistic example from the exam's scenarios all the way through, with diagrams and tables for the parts that are easier to see than to read. It names the traps the exam sets around that idea, because most CCAR-F questions are not "what is X" but "which of these four reasonable answers would an experienced architect pick". It ends with a small hands-on exercise that breaks the thing on purpose, a short list of takeaways, and five practice questions with every answer option explained: four written for the lesson and one from the same bank that powers the timed simulators. The sources are Anthropic's own documentation, linked at the bottom of each lesson.
You do not need to have written an agent to follow the lessons. Every term is explained the first time it appears, so a project manager, a QA engineer or a front-end developer can read them in order. Plan on 15 to 20 minutes per lesson.
How to use it
- Read the CCAR-F exam guide page once. It has the facts (60 questions, 120 minutes, pass at 720), the six scenarios, and the registration rules.
- Work through the domains in order. Domain 1 is 27% of the exam and everything else refers back to it.
- After each domain, take the domain quiz in the question bank. It draws 10 random questions from that domain and shows which task statements you keep missing.
- When every domain quiz is comfortably above 80%, sit the 60-question timed simulator. Treat a simulator score under 75% as "not yet", whatever the real pass mark is, because the real exam draws four scenarios you cannot predict.
Course outline
5 domains, 30 lessons, about 11 hours of reading. Domains are in the order the official guide lists them; the weight beside each is the share of the exam it carries.
Domain 1: Agentic Architecture & Orchestration
How a Claude agent runs, how a coordinator hands work to subagents, when a hook beats a prompt, and how sessions resume and fork. 27% of the CCAR-F exam.
- 1.1 Designing agentic loops
- 1.2 Multi-agent orchestration: the coordinator and its subagents
- 1.3 Spawning subagents: the Task tool, context passing and forking
- 1.4 Workflow enforcement and handoff: guarantees, not good intentions
- 1.5 Agent SDK hooks: intercepting tool calls and normalising data
- 1.6 Task decomposition: fixed pipelines versus adaptive plans
- 1.7 Sessions: resuming, forking and starting fresh
Domain 2: Tool Design & MCP Integration
Tool descriptions Claude can choose between, errors an agent can act on, the right tools for each agent, and MCP servers wired into Claude Code. 18% of CCAR-F.
Domain 3: Claude Code Configuration & Workflows
The CLAUDE.md hierarchy, slash commands and skills, path-scoped rules, plan mode versus direct execution, and Claude Code in CI. 20% of CCAR-F.
Domain 4: Prompt Engineering & Structured Output
Explicit criteria over vague instructions, few-shot examples, guaranteed JSON via tool use, retry loops, the Batches API and independent review. 20% of CCAR-F.
- 4.1 Explicit criteria: precision and false positives
- 4.2 Few-shot prompting for consistent, well-judged output
- 4.3 Structured output with tool use and JSON schemas
- 4.4 Validation, retry and feedback loops for extraction quality
- 4.5 Batch processing with the Message Batches API
- 4.6 Multi-instance and multi-pass review
Domain 5: Context Management & Reliability
Keeping facts intact in long conversations, when to escalate to a human, passing errors between agents, human review calibration and provenance. 15% of CCAR-F.
Three things that surprise people
The exam is about judgment, not recall. Almost every question presents a production problem and four plausible fixes. Three of them would work in some situation. The right one is the one the official guide's task statements describe. That is why every lesson teaches its task statement completely and names the distractors.
"Foundations" is not "easy". The Foundations exam tests exact details: which flag runs Claude
Code without a terminal, which file a shared slash command lives in, what tool_choice: "any"
guarantees. Hands-on time matters more here than in the Professional exam.
Six scenarios, four on the day. Every question sits inside one of six published scenarios. You get four of them, chosen at random. A third of what you prepare will not be asked, and you cannot know which third, so there is no shortcut around covering all six.
Frequently asked questions
Is this study guide really free?
Yes. Every lesson, every practice question on these pages, and the full question bank are free. The bank asks for an account only because the quiz engine has to store your answers to score them and show which domain is weak. Nothing here is behind a paywall.
Is it enough on its own to pass CCAR-F?
It covers every task statement in the official guide, which is what the questions are written against. What it cannot do is replace hands-on time. The exam tests details you normally look up, so build one small agent, configure Claude Code on one real project, and wire up one MCP server while you read.
How long does it take?
About eight hours of reading for the 30 lessons. Most people who already build with Claude spend one to two weeks on the guide plus the question bank; people newer to the tools spend three to four. The CCAR-F study plan article suggests a week-by-week schedule.
Is this affiliated with Anthropic?
No. It is an independent community resource. The exam facts come from Anthropic's published exam guide and the Partner Academy FAQ; the lessons and questions are written from scratch and none come from a real exam.
360 CCAR-F practice questions, free
360 practice questions here: a quiz per exam domain that pulls 10 questions at random, timed practice sets, and a full 60-question exam simulator on a 120-minute timer. Every answer option carries its own explanation, so a lucky guess reads the same as a wrong answer.
Open the CCAR-F question bank → Exam facts, rules and registration →
The question bank is free. It asks for an account only because the quiz engine has to store answers to score them and show which domains are weak. The questions on this page need nothing.