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.

Great followup that covers the topics expected during a system design interview and gives you the knowledge you'd need to perform better especially if you lack the FAANG experience in the first place.

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.