Study Guide

Five domains covering the Claude Certified Architect (Foundations) exam. Each page includes concept explanations, exam traps, practice scenarios, and a scored practice exam.

Out-of-Scope Topics

The following topics will not appear on the exam:

D1 Agentic Architecture & Orchestration 27%

Agentic loops, multi-agent orchestration, subagent invocation, workflow enforcement, hooks, task decomposition, session state.

D2 Tool Design & MCP Integration 18%

Tool descriptions, structured errors, tool distribution, tool_choice, MCP servers, built-in tools.

D3 Claude Code Configuration & Workflows 20%

CLAUDE.md hierarchy, slash commands, skills, path-specific rules, plan mode, iterative refinement, CI/CD.

D4 Prompt Engineering & Structured Output 20%

Explicit criteria, few-shot prompting, tool_use schemas, validation-retry, batch processing, multi-instance review.

D5 Context Management & Reliability 15%

Context preservation, escalation, error propagation, codebase exploration, confidence calibration, provenance.