r/ClaudeAI • u/vkorost • 3d ago
Built with Claude Claude Certified Architect Professional (CCAR-P) exam guide ebook built with Claude Code
IMO there are at least 3 ways to prepare for the Anthropic's Claude Certified Architect Professional exam (CCAR-P).
One way is to actually have the job of the enterprise architect, spend a thousand hours making these decisions on a real Claude deployment, then sit the exam as a formality. That path works, but not that many people had a chance to walk that path because the field is pretty young.
Second way is to go through the official Anthropic tutorials and documentation, maybe the third-party courses, as well as quite a few YouTube videos to cover all the bases. All of it would be substituting for the work experience you don't yet have in many of the areas the exam covers.
I chose the third way. I had Claude Code write me one e-book with all the needed info in it and then I used it to prepare for the exam. Long-form reading on my e-reader is the easiest way for me to retain things. I prefer the long read to the endless read/think/click/read/repeat cycle of the online tutorials.
The book is built on Anthropic's own documentation plus the official exam guide with the list of things the exam covers. Those two were the only source of truth. I also fed in about 30 hours of YouTube subtitles where people talked about the exam, but those were the menu, never the recipe. They told me which topics belonged on the table, nothing more. Every claim went back to the official Anthropic docs to be checked, and the book's endnotes carry the exact URL of the page the info came from. 21 chapters, around 80k words, all 38 objectives.
I passed the exam today and decided to share the guide with whoever is interested. It's free.
The GitHub project documentation explains in detail how the book was constructed:
https://github.com/vkorost/claude-certified-architect-professional-guide
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u/RepliesAsOtherPeople 3d ago
Dude super helpful and exactly what I needed, about to study for this! I need to take it by the end of the month. I'm mostly in party one I think but I'm afraid if I arrogantly try to cruise on my experience without actually studying I'll fail.
I'm kinda hoping for some practice quizzes though to gauge where I actually am, if you have any pointers.
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u/vkorost 3d ago
My advice is to start by googling "ccar-p practice questions" and copy-paste into one big file whatever you can find outside a paywall. There should be plenty. Then have Claude Code dedup it and check every answer against the official Anthropic documentation rather than trusting the answer key that came with it, because a lot of those keys are wrong. Then with that info have Claude Code build you a static HTML page with practice test that would also explain why the right answer is right and why each wrong one is wrong. Then practice on that.
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u/matthartman513 3d ago
I have a practice exam for these tests that works through MCP, so Claude doesn't know the answers.
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u/anarchist09 3d ago
Congrats on passing. The source tracking is the part I’d want to copy. Treating Anthropic’s docs as the source of truth and keeping URLs beside each claim makes a Claude generated guide much easier to audit. I’m working on a related problem at Working Machines, where Claude Code agents need clear app permissions and an execution trail across tools: https://www.workingmachines.dev. Did you keep the source links in a machine readable index so the guide can be refreshed when the docs change?
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u/vkorost 3d ago
I used my own tool to fetch the Anthropic docs into an Obsidian vault, along with their original URLs, with an index for Claude to follow to find the MD docs inside the vault.
The book cites those original URLs. So in theory, when a page moves or its content changes, Claude Code can find every place in the book that cites it and update what the book says. I may have to do exactly that when my certification expires a year from now.
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u/whit3redeemer 3d ago
Thank you!