Claude Certified Developer Foundations: Complete Course

Prepare for the Claude Certified Developer - Foundations exam while building a practical Claude-powered application from the ground up.

This course is designed around the implementation skills tested in the certification exam. Instead of only learning Claude concepts, you will build ShopAssist AI, a realistic customer support application for an online store. The project starts with Claude API fundamentals and gradually evolves into a production-style AI system with multi-turn conversations, structured outputs, backend tools, MCP integrations, agentic workflows, evaluation, debugging, security controls, and production optimization.

The course covers all eight certification domains:

Domain 1: Agents and Workflows. You will learn when to use deterministic workflows or agents, how agent loops work, how to build with the Claude Agent SDK, how coordinators and subagents communicate, and how agent frameworks and deployment models differ.

Domain 2: Applications and Integration. You will work with REST APIs, SDKs, Messages API concepts, application state, streaming, asynchronous execution, requirements, system lifecycle, configuration management, and production integration patterns.

Domain 3: Claude Code. You will learn repository setup, CLAUDE, rules, settings, Skills, commands, agents, Agent Memory, sessions, and Claude Code operating modes.

Domain 4: Eval, Testing, and Debugging. You will build evaluation workflows, grade Claude outputs, distinguish model failures from integration failures, analyze traces, choose recovery strategies, and prevent regressions.

Domain 5: Model Selection and Optimization. You will compare Claude model families, reasoning modes, latency and quality trade-offs, model versioning, token budgets, cost modeling, prompt caching, and realtime versus batch processing.

Domain 6: Prompt and Context Engineering. You will learn instruction placement, few-shot prompting, structured output, context management, defensive output handling, and techniques for preventing context drift and bloat.

Domain 7: Security and Safety. You will learn prompt-injection defense, handling untrusted input, protecting personally identifiable information, authentication, authorization, secrets management, least privilege, hooks, and layered guardrails.

Domain 8: Tools and MCPs. You will learn tool contracts, tool execution, built-in and custom tools, Skills, MCP server architecture, reusable MCP integrations, and safe backend operations.

Throughout the course, ShopAssist AI connects these concepts into one practical application. You will see how requirements affect model choice, how Claude requests real backend operations, how application code enforces sensitive rules, how failures are debugged, and how evaluation and monitoring help keep behavior reliable over time.

By the end of the course, you will understand how the CCDV-F exam topics connect to real Claude development. You will also have a practical mental model for building Claude-powered applications that are testable, maintainable, secure, cost-aware, and closer to production-ready.