The book behind
the certification.
A long-form companion to this study app — the architectural reasoning behind every lesson, five chapters mapped to the five CCA exam domains, worked examples for the parts of Claude most candidates skip.
Five chapters, five exam domains
Every chapter maps 1:1 to a CCA domain.
Prompt Engineering & AI Fluency
Precedence hierarchy, extended thinking, prefills, system-prompt design, and the fluency mental model.
Claude Code Development
CLAUDE.md, hooks, memory, MCP, SDK, and the six extension surfaces that shape the CLI's behavior.
Agentic Architecture
Subagents, orchestrator/worker patterns, parallel tool use, and the isolation trade-offs that matter.
Model Context Protocol
Host / Client / Server model, stdio + SSE transports, JSON Schema, sampling, and the auth layer.
Projects, Artifacts & Skills
Skills vs hooks, plan mode boundaries, artifact lifecycles, and Claude Code project scaffolding.
Why read it
The book to keep on the desk during exam prep.
This app gives you flashcards, quizzes, and diagrams. The book gives you the architectural intuition behind them — the same reasoning a certified architect uses when a design decision has no obvious answer.
- A single narrative through every CCA domain — not scattered lesson notes
- Worked examples for extended thinking, subagents, hooks, MCP, and skills
- End-of-chapter self-tests aligned to the practice quiz in this app
- Written by an engineer who ships production Claude systems, not a generalist
Ready to read?
The book lives on matsiems.com — free preview, purchase, and DRM-free downloads.