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System Design Interview – An insider's guide

by Alex Xu (Author)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 2,665 ratings
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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
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Previous page
  1. ISBN-13
    979-8664653403
  2. Publication date
    June 12, 2020
  3. Language
    English
  4. Dimensions
    6 x 0.73 x 9 inches
  5. Print length
    320 pages
  6. See all details
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Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
Previous page
  1. System Design Interview – An Insider's Guide: Volume 2
  2. Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
  3. Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions (Cracking the Interview & Career)
  4. Machine Learning System Design Interview
  5. Hacking the System Design Interview: Real Big Tech Interview Questions and In-depth Solutions
  6. Understanding Distributed Systems, Second Edition: What every developer should know about large distributed applications
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  1. Consider using cache when data is read frequently but modified infrequently.
    Highlighted by 1,899 Kindle readers
  2. The ability to ask good questions is also an essential skill, and many interviewers specifically look for this skill.
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  3. 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 ‏ : ‎ 15.2 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.73 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 2,665 ratings

About the author

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Alex Xu

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

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
2,665 global ratings
Ordered from Saudi Arabia
3 Stars
Ordered from Saudi Arabia
The book contains a lot of valuable information, but I am a person who loves colors, and I was surprised that the entire book was printed in black and white, which is very boring to read. I was also surprised by the quality of the printing, as it was not the best, and a part of the book was bended.
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Top reviews from the United States

M Carmen Trevino
5.0 out of 5 stars 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.
1,030 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing book for beginners to system design!
Reviewed in the United States on April 1, 2024
Verified Purchase
I got a system design interview out of no where. Hadn’t even occurred to me after 3 years of professional experience that I was so close to this part of my career. My friend recommended this book and WOW! This was a godsend. It explains so many abstract concepts so well and doesn’t muddy you down with implementation details that I know I would get hung up on. This has been one of my favorite books to read.
One person found this helpful
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Aaron
4.0 out of 5 stars Good information; terrible editing and presentation
Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2023
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The content of the book is pretty good. It's a decent walkthrough of high level concepts. But it is painful to read sometimes. Partly because the author can't decide whether he wants to go in-depth or surface on a topic; the depth level is all over the place. But also because the author is obviously not a native English speaker, and the book is riddled with errors. Examples:

"Communicate with your interview" (should be interviewer)
"Give the high-level design first then drills down" (should be "drill")

There's a couple of these on every single page of the book, which spoils both reading speed and enjoyment.

The copyright page lists an editor, but I don't know what editing they actually did.
12 people found this helpful
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Mlevitin
5.0 out of 5 stars Must read
Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 2024
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A great and easy to read book
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Michael W.
5.0 out of 5 stars Elegant and well thought!
Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2021
Verified Purchase
It is the best book that discusses the system design so far!
I read a few posts from other people, and I think those comments do not really reflect the author's true intent. The author was trying to provide a generic way of how to approach the design issues and provided some classic design patterns. The book is very well organized. In the first few chapters, it tells you the common ways to scale the system and then gradually dive into deeper to show some fundamental concepts and practical ways of how a distributed system should be built. For example, Consistent Hashing is the foundation and has been used so many places, Alex explained very well. Then he discussed how to efficiently compare the nodes and how to detect the temp and permanent failures and recover from the failure. Yes, some of the content can be considered as "borrowed" from the paper, but Alex put them together in a very nice and easy way and save you a lot of questions and time. I read the original paper and still get inspired by the book. Another example is the Youtube chapter, Alex used some concepts from facebook paper. But we have to appreciate that he understood the content and put into such an easy way that you don’t need to spend a day to read facebook paper and still only 60% understanding.
You also need to think of the first eight chapters are the building blocks of the distributed system, and they are the real challenges. Maybe in no interviews, people will ask the same questions, but these technics are really needed for you to build a good distributed system. For example, there is no global clock in the distributed system; then Twitter came up a Snowflake unique ID with the time concept in it. For example, the unique ID becomes the foundation of generating the short URL and newsfeed. For example, the Merkle tree helps you efficiently compare the difference between the nodes.
Yes, there are some chapters that seem to be oversimplified, such as Google drive chapter, but overall the book covered a lot of patterns that require building the distributed system.
A suggestion for Alex, organized the book into two sections, the common challenges and practical patterns for the distributed system, then dive into the interview questions.
Great effort, I will give my 5 stars!
5 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Mohamed Y.
5.0 out of 5 stars The best book to prepare for tech interviews.
Reviewed in Canada on February 17, 2024
Verified Purchase
This book taught me a lot, even as a Senior Engineer in Big tech. Volume 2 is worth buying if you want to go further.
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Nambi
5.0 out of 5 stars Great reading
Reviewed in India on February 27, 2024
Verified Purchase
- Explains the design of most commonly used systems in the industry with great clarity
- Analysing all possible solutions to a problem, listing the pros and cons of each approach, thus helping in making more informed decisions
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kantantsin malikau
5.0 out of 5 stars Must have for any kind of developer!
Reviewed in Germany on February 7, 2023
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4 people found this helpful
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António Pós-de-Mina
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent for all IT levels of maturity
Reviewed in Spain on December 23, 2022
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Excellent for juniors and seniors, juniors had an overview about arch and seniors had a refresh about new technology.
One person found this helpful
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Popa Constantin
2.0 out of 5 stars Pretty good but not worth the price
Reviewed in Italy on September 1, 2022
Verified Purchase
What this book really offers is a collection of well-chosen examples of System Design questions that will indeed prepare you for the interviews. However, the individual examples are not something that you cannot find online already. If you read the index and looked up yourself a few examples online on how to design a specific app/platform, you would be just as good.

I consider the quality of the explanations found in the book not superior in any way, sometimes quite the opposite. The author could have gone more in-depth on some important topics, without having to go look online at additional resources. This is another aspect that does not help with justifying the price tag. Sometimes some pictures are so trivial and superfluous that you get the impression that the author wanted to reach a certain number of pages and didn't know how. If you don't understand, look at Figure 15-4 (the icon of a hard drive), Figure 14-1 (Youtube homepage??), Figure 12-1 (a simple list would have been enough), and many others.

I am not saying it is awful, but I am pretty disappointed with what I got after paying 38 euros.
2 people found this helpful
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