Book review: Alex Xu | System Design Interview – An insider's guide, Second Edition Paperback – June 12, 2020

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Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2020

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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.

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vw_pora

5.0 out of 5 stars clear book, does not incorporate cloud native patterns

Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2020

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Descent fundamentals overview, with a set of design questions and answers. The guidelines and answers and have a good level of description and break-down.

However, none of the answers incorporate any of the cloud-native patterns. This book will not be helpful for anyone interviewing for more senior positions. If you are already in the cloud space and want to find out what gaps you have for an interview, you are better off reading some of the cloud-native or microservice pattern related books.

The problems presented in this book can be found elsewhere on the internet however the answers in this book are clearly laid out and explained. As far as technical content goes similar to what can be found in the wild.

Very useful for a junior-mid level engineer, and possibly a decent starting point for a senior engineer.

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