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4.06 AVERAGE
4.06 AVERAGE
laurao's review
This book provides potential answers for design interviews, but does not help with the tradeoffs between potential answers.
yaltidoka24's review against another edition
4.0
Great prep book for interviews
This book broke down different examples to learn about different design approaches. Super helpful for PM preparations! Great to skim or read all the way through.
This book broke down different examples to learn about different design approaches. Super helpful for PM preparations! Great to skim or read all the way through.
mburnamfink's review against another edition
5.0
Last time I went up for tech jobs, I know I definitely lost positions because I bombed the system design interview. That won't happen again.
Xu's book provides wonderful examples of how to get through one of these, with examples of the right questions to ask in terms of scale, queries, and reliability, and examples of practical questions, from a simple rate limiter to complex infrastructure Youtube and Google Drive. The 16 examples are clearly explained with increasingly detailed diagrams and extensive notes.
This isn't a deep dive, more of a wave at key ideas like horizontal scaling, stateless web servers, caching, and load balancing. As other reviewers have pointed out, Kleppman's Designing Data Intensive Systems gets at the gritty implementation of these things in a cursed world of fallible hardware and network connections in a much deeper way. But System Design Interview is a worthy companion to Cracking the Coding Interview for flimflamming the asshole standing between you and a salary.
Xu's book provides wonderful examples of how to get through one of these, with examples of the right questions to ask in terms of scale, queries, and reliability, and examples of practical questions, from a simple rate limiter to complex infrastructure Youtube and Google Drive. The 16 examples are clearly explained with increasingly detailed diagrams and extensive notes.
This isn't a deep dive, more of a wave at key ideas like horizontal scaling, stateless web servers, caching, and load balancing. As other reviewers have pointed out, Kleppman's Designing Data Intensive Systems gets at the gritty implementation of these things in a cursed world of fallible hardware and network connections in a much deeper way. But System Design Interview is a worthy companion to Cracking the Coding Interview for flimflamming the asshole standing between you and a salary.
bionicjulia's review against another edition
3.0
This is a real gem of a book, and gave me a good intro as to the types of things I should be thinking about when coming up with a system design. I haven’t finished the book, but am instead, learning from the author’s YouTube and newsletter, which offers information on systems design in a more digestible way.
markh892's review against another edition
3.0
Good for one thing, interview problems. The examples are not thorough enough to be useful. And they are not specific enough to give a deeper insight into unique problems. There are many typos as well. Not terrible, but certainly not worth reading through again unless I specifically want to brush up on basic system design interviews.
ethannp's review against another edition
5.0
High value, low bs. Learnt a lot about distributed systems, their design, and how to think about the associated interviews, all at once! Very well explained, though a quick round of copy editing would be nice for the 2nd edition. Very well organized. Expensive book but I’d say worth the price.
msuzannah's review
informative
medium-paced
5.0
Really useful for anyone with an up coming system design interview. I'd also recommend it to people trying to improve their skills generally as well.