System Design Interview – An Insider’s Guide (Volume 2)This book can be seen as a sequel to the book: System Design Interview – An Insider’s Guide. It covers a different set of system design interview questions and solutions. Although reading Volume 1 is helpful, it is not required. This book should be accessible to readers who have a basic understanding of distributed systems.This volume provides a reliable strategy and knowledge base for approaching a broad range of system design questions that you may encounter. It will help you feel confident during this important interview. This book provides a step-by-step framework for how to tackle a system design question. It also includes many real-world examples to illustrate a systematic approach, with detailed and well-explained steps 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.- 13 real system design interview questions with detailed solutions.- 300+ diagrams to visually explain how different systems work.Table of ContentsChapter 1: Proximity ServiceChapter 2: Nearby FriendsChapter 3: Google MapsChapter 4: Distributed Message QueueChapter 5: Metrics MonitoringChapter 6: Ad Click Event AggregationChapter 7: Hotel ReservationChapter 8: Distributed Email ServiceChapter 9: S3-like Object StorageChapter 10: Real-time Gaming LeaderboardChapter 11: Payment SystemChapter 12: Digital WalletChapter 13: Stock Exchange
Alex Xu
File Size: 84 MB
Available File Formats: PDF AZW3 DOCX EPUB MOBI TXT or Kindle audiobook Audio CD(Several files can be converted to each other)
Language: English, Francais, Italiano, Espanol, Deutsch, chinese
- I have followed Alex’s Linkedin for a while as he always posts easy-to-digest system design materials so I bought the book immediately after it was released. This book is not only helpful for system design interviews but covers a good breadth and depth of different complex systems, such as stock exchange, payment system, email server, etc. I really enjoyed reading this book.I wish there are more books like this. Besides this book, I recommend the following:- system design primer github by donnemartin- eng blogs: uber, airbnb, discord, facebook, netflix, etc.- some important papers: scaling memcache at facebook, google’s 3 papers in big data,- design data-intensive applications by Martin Kleppmann- system design interview by alex xu, volume 1. This is more basic but it’s still a good read.- youtube channels: system design interview channel, uber engineering, infoq, and hussein nasser.- find mock interview partners. This can be really helpful.
- Disclaimer – I am neither prepping for an interview nor I myself quiz candidates on such open-ended system design topics. Curious after viewing design diagram for a prototypical “Payment Engine” by the author in LinkedIn, I purchased the book. It proved to be a very good investment of money, time and energy. Just ordered Alex’s first book!Contents -SDI-Vol 2 has 13 chapters, on how to design Proximity Service (TenCent influenced), Nearby Friends (Amazon), Distributed Message Queue, Real-time Gaming Leaderboard, Payments Engine, Digital Wallet and a few more. Each spans about 30 pages with clearly drawn workflow diagram, high level design (e.g., API stubs, push vs. pull, choice of data store etc), BOTE calculation to plan throughput/capacity, bullet-pointed wrap up, a one-page mind map of the design and reasonably exhaustive index of useful reference materials.Particularly impressive is the way authors have (a) briefly introduced key, but slightly less mainstream concepts like HdrHistorgram, Hamilton Curve, FIX protocol, Secure-ID etc, and (b) discussed possible alternative solutions (e.g., TC/C vs. Saga for distributed transactions), where applicable. I now work in FinTech and both the “Payment System” (heavily influenced by stripe) and “Digital Wallet” sections are extremely well done, concise and useful abstractions for real enterprise systems.Second-order Applicability -Apart from SDI – and I doubt many companies would ask “Design a service to find nearby friends” to most interviewees – this should be a very useful book for three reasons.One – Flight Simulator mode. If you’re familiar with “core concepts” like Nearest-N neighbors, distributed time-series database, different aggregation windows streaming, Hotspot shard, idempotency and immutability in strongly consistent systems, write-ahead log etc but have not used most of them in “real life”, this book offers a quick walkthrough of systems where it gets used, and how. Investing time here is like practicing how to land during Category 5 storm in a flight simulator. Even if you may never need to land the plane like that, it is good to at least have an idea how it is done.Two – Scalability-Consistency-Availability Triad. This could be a one- or two- week long crash course in “how to scale system”. Especially, early back-of-the-envelope (BOTE) calculations shown here were fundamental arbiter on the final design choice. e.g., Payment Systems do not usually have a problem of scale. They rarely process more than ~10 tps. In such systems, however, each transaction must be “strongly consistent” (no double payment!). Some systems can manage transient loss of availability with minimal operational friction (e.g., blips in a monitoring system are unlikely to cause massive disruption), while some others (e.g., Object Storage) need to build for availability grounds-up. In all real-life systems there are certain “Day Zero Decisions” that can only be done right during design. Going through this book stretches those decision muscles well.Three – Up-leveling (or, clear communication). This is, I guess, where the SDI – or the interview part – comes in to filter out understanding from verbosity. Fundamentally, designing a system is not the most difficult part in engineering software. Decision binding right choice with key players – each with varying ego, objectives and goals – is where effort cycles are spent. This book is a good way to communicate these decisions in a structured, objective and somewhat universal language to both technical and executive leadership. The mind maps accompanying each design were the best parts of the book and they provide a good, repeatable framework to work on similar initiatives. Frameworks rule in complex domain of “system design” as the practitioner has a good starting point with good framework and can then focus on the other unique aspects of the system to be built/managed.Great book. Perhaps the language could have been a tightened a bit here and there with an expert editor. But very very close to 5-stars! Looking forward to a premium publisher doing justice to this series.
- The system design interview series is a great balance between technical depth and practical use. Alex gets to the point quickly for each system design question while at the same time providing deep insights into complex systems.I recommend reading this book, especially if you are pressed for time.
- This is the best book I have read about System Design and is useful for every backend engineer – whether they are preparing for an interview or not. This book covers some of the most important topics in today’s software industry and provides cutting-edge designs in a well-defined structure.Being an engineering manager and technical architect, I have interviewed 100+ engineers for many years, and successful candidates nail each individual section as structured in the book – whether it is about asking relevant questions, giving proper back-of-the-envelope estimation, giving high-level design of APIs/databases, detailed design or even identifying bottlenecks and solve for them. Successful candidates discuss multiple relevant solutions before choosing the best and this book provides many such solutions with pros/cons for each approach.Each section is well illustrated with clear and simple diagrams that even a new college graduate can follow. A picture is worth a thousand words and this book has beautifully used illustrations to convey the concepts. Even experienced engineers and architects learn from what they haven’t been working on. For example, an engineer at one company might want to know the challenges involved in building cutting-edge designs for other complex systems like Google maps Or Uber-like systems. This book provides practical, well-thought-through, beautifully written solutions.The links/references at the end I have found super helpful too. You can go to those links, read them if you want to drill even further down on any topic. I have tried a few other books and websites but others are either too theoretical or don’t have the quality content that this book has, having been written by experienced engineers and architects.This is a must-have book for anyone pursuing a backend engineering career, and glad to be owning and reading this book. This will certainly make you stand out in the interview and will make you a better engineer.
- It is an excellent read for anyone looking to learn how large scale systems work. The authors done a great job in breaking down complex systems to small and digestible blocks. I really like the book!
- Really nice extension to the first part. Very informative and indepth designs. I would highly recommend to read this. Just cutting one star as received a few pages torn.
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File Size: 84 MB
