Like it. Very useful!

I'm a newbie to system design, and was overwhelmed how can I find a way to get a senses of corresponding concepts. after spending about two days ask claude and chatgpt, I'm annoyed as the result I get is not systemaicall requires a lot time . Or watching youtube videos, yet I either watched content that is too senior to me or content are scattered. This book organized way help u first have an understanding with fundamental concepts and bigger view, then dive to examples. It is super comprehensible to who just started learning system design at first 3 days.

I have both vol1 and vol2, also purchased some online tutorial, but this is still the best resource for SD interview. Must have!

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.

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!

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.