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A review by mburnamfink
System Design Interview – An insider's guide by Alex Xu
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.