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System Design Interview – An insider's guide Paperback – Illustrated, June 12 2020

by Alex Xu (Author)

4.5 2,300 ratings

in Parallel Processing Computers

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System Design Interview - An Insider's Guide (Volume 1)

System design interviews are the most difficult to tackle of all technical interview questions. This book is Volume 1 of the System Design Interview - An insider’s guide series that provides a reliable strategy and knowledge base for approaching a broad range of system design questions. This book provides a step-by-step framework for how to tackle a system design question. It includes many real-world examples to illustrate the systematic approach, with detailed steps that you can follow.

What’s inside?
- An insider’s take on what interviewers really look for and why.
- A 4-step framework for solving any system design interview question.
- 16 real system design interview questions with detailed solutions.
- 188 diagrams to visually explain how different systems work.

Table Of Contents
Chapter 1: Scale From Zero To Millions Of Users
Chapter 2: Back-of-the-envelope Estimation
Chapter 3: A Framework For System Design Interviews
Chapter 4: Design A Rate Limiter
Chapter 5: Design Consistent Hashing
Chapter 6: Design A Key-value Store
Chapter 7: Design A Unique Id Generator In Distributed Systems
Chapter 8: Design A Url Shortener
Chapter 9: Design A Web Crawler
Chapter 10: Design A Notification System
Chapter 11: Design A News Feed System
Chapter 12: Design A Chat System
Chapter 13: Design A Search Autocomplete System
Chapter 14: Design Youtube
Chapter 15: Design Google Drive
Chapter 16: The Learning Continues

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publication date

June 12 2020
Dimensions

15.24 x 1.85 x 22.86 cm
ISBN-13

979-8664653403
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Consider using cache when data is read frequently but modified infrequently.
Highlighted by 1,443 Kindle readers
The ability to ask good questions is also an essential skill, and many interviewers specifically look for this skill.
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When choosing a sharding key, one of the most important criteria is to choose a key that can evenly distributed data.
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Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08CMF2CQF
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Independently published (June 12 2020)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8664653403
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 431 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.24 x 1.85 x 22.86 cm

Best Sellers Rank: #9,166 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1 in Network Administration
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- #2 in Assembly Language Programming (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.5 2,300 ratings

About the author

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Alex Xu

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Alex Xu is an experienced software engineer and entrepreneur. Previously, he worked at Twitter, Apple and Zynga. He can be found online at linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-xu-a8131b11/) and twitter (@alexxubyte)

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5

2,300 global ratings

5 star		72%
4 star		17%
3 star		6%
2 star		2%
1 star		3%

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Top reviews from Canada

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apurva singh

Extensive coverage of topics

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 21, 2022

Verified Purchase

Book covers wide variety of projects. It may not go into details of certain topics like designing CDN, DNS, or Transcoder, but then there is absolutely no time to go into how to design CDN while giving a system design Youtube. The references are vast and extensive. Very good selection. I guess author can add Uber, AirBnb, CDN, DNS to his selection.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 12, 2021

Verified Purchase

Multiple typos in a published book, not cheap either. Should have hired a spell checker.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

haifzhan

Good system design book

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 19, 2022

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Bought this book a couple of months ago, it's really good covers all sd basics and has the pattern for answering similiar design questions.

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Vinayak Raghuvamshi

necessary but not sufficient

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 2, 2021

Verified Purchase

I conduct system design interviews myself. The uses cases covered in the book are impressive however the actual design itself is mediocre most of the times. There is no creativity and it falls short in discussing the various tradeoffs in design decisions.

It also totally lacks a dive deep on key aspects of the design. For example, design a youtube lacks dive deep on challenges we may face while building the transcoding subsystem.

I would recommend candidates to use this book as a 'syllabus indicator' and supplement their study with other materials freely available on the net and also some good video tutorials on youtube.

23 people found this helpful

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tommy do cao

Powerful knowledge right in your palm

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on June 21, 2020

Verified Purchase

This book is amazing! Very professional, helpful and well explained. Not only it helps to be well prepared but it also helps me to understand the interview questions at different angles. System Design is very complex but this book is giving me the whole knowledge right in my hand.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 4, 2021

Verified Purchase

Helpful for my interview

Helpful

Abhijeet

Vague explanations. would rate it 0.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on November 30, 2022

Verified Purchase

Vague explanations. would rate it 0.

Helpful

YL

Superficial answers in this book

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on April 29, 2021

Verified Purchase

The system design questions presented in this book are said to be of relevance, however the answers are fairly hand-waving at the best, they severely lack details in how and why important design decisions were made, there is no elaboration of how to develop design ideas or how to evolve intuitions into formal designs.

I was entirely disappointed at the content of this book.

7 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

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Nelo

Lo que buscaba

Reviewed in Spain 🇪🇸 on February 26, 2023

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Este libro és para un regalo para un familiar. Está muy satisfecho, y probablemente comprará el otro libro que forma parte de la misma colección
https://www.amazon.es/System-Design-Interview-Insiders-Guide/dp/1736049119/ref=d_pd_sim_sccl_2_1/262-0444251-7608337?pd_rd_w=23DUi&content-id=amzn1.sym.2d1ea82c-dc4f-43ae-b5a1-74c311f81fdc&pf_rd_p=2d1ea82c-dc4f-43ae-b5a1-74c311f81fdc&pf_rd_r=3JA417A3ATP9RMACFWXG&pd_rd_wg=sBpYq&pd_rd_r=e307049f-6ea7-4792-bb7c-c71267f32ec2&pd_rd_i=1736049119&psc=1

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António Pós-de-Mina

Excellent for all IT levels of maturity

Reviewed in Spain 🇪🇸 on December 23, 2022

Verified Purchase

Excellent for juniors and seniors, juniors had an overview about arch and seniors had a refresh about new technology.

One person found this helpful

ANTONIO G.

Contenido bueno, calidad de la impresión regular

Reviewed in Spain 🇪🇸 on December 22, 2022

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El contenido es muy bueno, y no hay mucho sobre arquitectura de sistemas. Pero me ha sorprendido mucho recibir un libro tan caro (36 euros he pagado) como si estuviese impreso en la copistería de mi pueblo. No sé si es así o me han timado, parece una copia pirata. Yo que quería tener el original y ahora no sé ni lo que tengo, hay una versión traducida de Anaya que por lo menos no da la impresión de que se va a deshacer en las manos.

Content is great, but the print quality is so poor, it looks like a PDF copy you may get in a shop printing outfit. Not what I expected for 36 euros, and not sure if I've been scammed.

2 people found this helpful

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M Carmen Hernandez

Top-notch content, but not sufficient as sole resource. I'll provide some more.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 7, 2020

Verified Purchase

The book is pretty good. It’s easy to read. There are lots of design diagrams. If you are a visual person, you will love the book. It helped me pass the system design round at FANG.

I read the book twice and take notes. I read all the reference materials mentioned in the book. Reading those extra materials help me a lot with topics I’m not familiar with.

Highlights:
+ The book has a good set of questions.
+ Lots of diagrams and clear explanation.
+ You will learn something new by reading the book regardless of your experience.

Drawbacks:
- I wish the reference links are footnotes instead of being at the end of chapters. That way, it’s more accessible.
- Some topics are not talked about too much like security and stream processing.
- It’s tailored towards junior and semi-senior engineers. Some chapters are not deep enough. For example, I wish the author would talk more about feed ranking and caching in the designing news feed chapter.

Overall, it’s a masterpiece in system design books. However, no book can cover everything in system design. No one knows every system. Here are some of my other recommendations:

-- designing data-intensive applications. Highly recommended.
-- system design primer github repo. Highly recommended free resource.
-- Leetcode discussion forum about system designs.
-- Grokking the system interview course. This is an ok resource but not very deep.
-- Various youtube channels. I like channels like Tushar Roy, System Design Interview, Success in Tech, etc. There are a lot more but I found them most useful for senior engineer positions.
-- Various tech blogs: Facebook, Netflix, Uber, AirBnb, etc. Those tech blogs are extremely valuable to help us understand real-life systems.
-- highscalability website. The website contains lots of real world systems.
-- InfoQ youtube channel. Many tech companies talk about how they scale their systems at infoQ. I find sometimes it’s quite hard to find useful videos on google but when I narrow down it to a specific channel, it’s much easier to find. For example, I found a lot of useful tech talks about uber there. It’s invaluable when I interviewed there.

935 people found this helpful

Bobby

Worth the money

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on May 5, 2023

Verified Purchase

If you are preparing for an interview or want to expand your system design knowledge, it's a good read.

The printing quality is good, but not as flashy as the books published by O'Reilly, for example.
The book is quite lengthy and thick but it reads fast. There are lots of pictures and diagrams and the font is quite big so don't be discouraged by the size. Getting through it will probably take you about 8-10 hours of reading.

That being said, if you are planning to interview for a senior+ position L5, L6 I'd say this book is not enough. But every chapter has a list of references for the information, usually tech blogs of known companies such as AirBnB and Netflix. So, if you want to ace a System Design interview I would strongly encourage you to go through the book AND read all the reference materials.

Overall it's a good book but not as thorough and technical as Designing Data-Intensive Applications (also a very good read)

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