CCAR-F: Claude Certified Architect Foundations Prep

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

The Claude Certified Architect - Foundations (CCAR-F) exam from Anthropic evaluates the design judgment of solution architects and senior engineers who build production agents, workflows, and tools on Claude. This course, built by instructor Aseem Mankotia, is a structured exam-focused preparation layer covering all five domains published in the official Exam Guide (weights subject to iteration): Agentic Architecture and Orchestration, Claude Code Configuration and Workflows, Prompt Engineering and Structured Output, Tool Design and MCP Integration, and Context Management and Reliability.

Across ten chapters you work through scenario-first design questions - subagents versus a single agent loop, a tool versus an MCP server versus a skill, batch versus realtime structured output, and how to preserve context across a long-running agent session. Hands-on labs have you design a coordinator-subagent system for a stated use case, write a project-memory file paired with a custom skill, define a tool schema and an MCP server split, build a validation-and-retry loop for structured output, and draft a context-management plan for an extended agent session. Every chapter maps to its exam domain and weight, with heavily tested concepts, common traps, and cert-anchored practice questions modeled on the real exam style.

This is exam-focused preparation, not a general Claude tutorial - pair it with Anthropic Academy's free courses (Building with the Claude API, Introduction to MCP, Claude Code in Action) for additional hands-on depth. The final chapter walks through a full 60-question, 120-minute exam simulation and explains the scaled scoring model, where a result of 720 out of 1000 is required to be certified, and that scale is not the same as a raw percent-correct count. Aseem Mankotia designed this course for architects preparing to sit the proctored Pearson VUE exam and feed forward into the Architect Professional track.

AI content disclosure: This course was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools. Lecture narration is AI-voice generated, and lecture scripts, slides, and practice questions were drafted with AI assistance, then reviewed and curated by the instructor for technical accuracy and alignment with the official CCAR-F exam guide.