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System Design Interview – An insider's guide Paperback – Illustrated, June 12 2020
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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 length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJune 12 2020
- Dimensions15.24 x 1.85 x 22.86 cm
- ISBN-13979-8664653403
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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: #6,275 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1 in Network Administration
- #1 in Bioinformatics
- #2 in Parallel Processing Computers (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

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)
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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.
I was entirely disappointed at the content of this book.
Top reviews from other countries

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


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.

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.

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)