System Design Interview – An Insider’s Guide: Volume 2
$40.00
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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 Contents
Chapter 1: Proximity Service
Chapter 2: Nearby Friends
Chapter 3: Google Maps
Chapter 4: Distributed Message Queue
Chapter 5: Metrics Monitoring
Chapter 6: Ad Click Event Aggregation
Chapter 7: Hotel Reservation
Chapter 8: Distributed Email Service
Chapter 9: S3-like Object Storage
Chapter 10: Real-time Gaming Leaderboard
Chapter 11: Payment System
Chapter 12: Digital Wallet
Chapter 13: Stock Exchange
Publisher : Byte Code LLC
Publication date : March 11, 2022
Language : English
Print length : 434 pages
ISBN-10 : 1736049119
ISBN-13 : 978-1736049112
Item Weight : 1.66 pounds
Dimensions : 7 x 0.98 x 10 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #20,718 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #2 in Computer Systems Analysis & Design (Books) #2 in Web Services #12 in Software Development (Books)
Customer Reviews: 4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars (1,454) var dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction; P.when(‘A’, ‘ready’).execute(function(A) { if (dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction !== true) { dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction = true; A.declarative( ‘acrLink-click-metrics’, ‘click’, { “allowLinkDefault”: true }, function (event) { if (window.ue) { ue.count(“acrLinkClickCount”, (ue.count(“acrLinkClickCount”) || 0) + 1); } } ); } }); P.when(‘A’, ‘cf’).execute(function(A) { A.declarative(‘acrStarsLink-click-metrics’, ‘click’, { “allowLinkDefault” : true }, function(event){ if(window.ue) { ue.count(“acrStarsLinkWithPopoverClickCount”, (ue.count(“acrStarsLinkWithPopoverClickCount”) || 0) + 1); } }); });
Yevhenii Hloba –
I should’ve read it earlier
fter reading Volume 1, I finally had the chance to dive into System Design Interview: Volume 2, and it exceeded my expectations. The author once again delivers a clear, structured, and highly practical approach to one of the most crucial topics for interviews in big tech companies.This book helped me connect the dots that were missing for years. The explanations are intuitive, the frameworks are actionable, and the real-world examples make complex concepts feel accessible. I genuinely learned a lot — and can’t help but think that if I had read this a few years earlier, I might have had a very different career trajectory, possibly transitioning to a product company much sooner.Huge thanks to the author for creating such a valuable resource. It’s more than a book — it’s a confidence booster and a roadmap for anyone aiming to level up their system design skills.
Neeraj –
Must have for all backend engineers, cutting-edge concepts illustrated beautifully and structured
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.
Ting K –
Great book even for non-backend engineers
I read Alex’s first book when preparing for my job change and it helped me land a job that I really enjoy. When I heard there was volume 2, I immediately bought it and read it. After doing interviews on both sides as a candidate and an interviewer, I could say these two books are truly useful. This volume 2 book even has broader and deeper technical content than volume 1. I particularly liked the proximity service and hotel reservation chapters. The proximity service chapter explained some of the most important geospatial algorithms: geohash, quadtree, Google S2, etc. It not only explained how those algorithms work at the high level but also when and why we should use them. Many other resources jump into sharding immediately. This book actually did the math about the memory and storage requirement, and came to the conclusion that sharding may not be required as the memory footprint was usually small for the geospatial index. I really appreciate the book authors doing this as this is exactly what we do in real design. We back our design with napkin math. I also liked the hotel reservation chapter. It defined the problem and scope really well. Not everything needed to be distributed. For a hotel reservation system, the QPS is not high and the challenge of this system lies in handling concurrent requests. This chapter gave a good overview of optimistic locking, pessimistic locking, and caching. I’ve heard about those terms from time to time but never used them in real life. It’s really nice to see how they were actually used in real systems. Are the books good for interview training and learning some new knowledge? Absolutely yes. PROs:+ A lot of visuals. There are visuals every 2-3 pages.+ The book is easy to digest despite covering some of the advanced topics such as distributed transactions, S3, stock exchange, etc.+ This book might increase your chance to get into FAANG. CONs:- It doesn’t cover all the system design topics.- It probably will increase your chance to get into FAANG, but you will likely need other resources as well. Other materials for system design:+ For those who like YouTube, the SystemDesignInterview channel is good. It is taught by someone from Amazon(?).+ Uber, Airbnb, Meta eng blogs are pretty awesome. + DDIA book+ Do mock interviews. + Harvard CS75 Lecture 9 Scalability Web Development David Malan. You can find the video on YouTube.+ System Design primer GitHub repository.
Petr –
I would say you want to buy Volume 1 aswell
Patrizio –
This book is a very good introduction to System Design, providing very good insights, some basic knowledge is assumed, so, I would suggest to possibly read a more basic book before approaching this one, especially for readers new to the topic. Recommended
Antonio Silva –
Although some descriptions could be better from a software architecture perspective and the relation qualities-reasoning is not very rigorous, the case studies are OK, they are rich of content, to give students to work in classes.
Cliente Amazon –
Thanks for sharing such as great knowledge here, nice source to deep dive into system design topics, good job though
Bozhidar Atanasov –
The book was an educational, fairly high level overview of systems to be encountered during interviews and how to handle questions around them.More in-depth resources are most likely needed in combination with this one.