System Design Interviews are known and widely feared for their vague and open-ended question without having a right or wrong solution. The scope of the interview is also greatly varying from High-Level Design(HLD) Interview to Low-Level Design(LLD). While System Design Interviews form a very important part of the overall interview process and help in accessing the capability of the individual to engage in discussions regarding the choice of tools and technologies while also judging them on their communication and problem-solving skills. They are intimidating for the depth and the breadth of the scope of the interview. In this blog post, I will be listing 3 books you can use to prepare for your System Design Interviews.
While the books in this list are in no way meant to be an exhaustive list of resources you can use to prepare for your System Design Interview, they will cover, to a great extent, the most frequently asked topics in System Design Interviews.
System Design Interview
System Design Interview: An Insiders Guide by Alex Xu is my favourite book for preparing for System Design Interviews. The book is perfect for people who have an understanding of Software Engineering and basic concepts of Computer Science but have either never faced a System Design Interview, or never got to study it.
The book starts by introducing various important concepts such as Scaling- Horizontal and Vertical, Load Balancing, Sharding, Replication, Cache, and Content Delivery Networks(CDNs) among other things. From there it goes on to other important topics such as Rate Limiters, Consistent Hashing, while also covering in-depth some of the most frequently asked designing Questions including the designs of chatting applications, Google Drive, URL Shortner, Youtube, Web-Crawlers, etc.
There is no other book in the market that offers more bang for your buck when it comes to System Design. If I could suggest only one book for System Design, this would be it.
Designing Data Intensive Applications
Designing Data Intensive Applications, the big ideas behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems by Martin Kleppmann is another fantastic book for acing your System Design Interview. While it is not nearly as beginner friendly as System Design Interview, it is a great book for people who have prior knowledge about System Design. The book provides in-depth knowledge about various Databasing solutions, while also highlighting their internal workings, advantages, and disadvantages. The book also talks in depth about Distributed Data, Replication, Sharding, Partitioning, etc.
In my opinion, one should definitely go for this book if they have gone through the System Design Interview book or have a functioning knowledge about System Design but want to go deeper and broaden the horizons of their knowledge.
Head First Design Patterns
Both the books discussed so far are primarily for High-Level Design, or HLD. For covering Low-Level Design, or LLD, Head First Design Patterns: Building Extensible & Maintainable Object-Oriented Software by Eric Freeman & Elisabeth Robson is one of the best books out there. The book covers Object Oriented design patterns, including Object Oriented Design principles upon which design patterns are based. However, one negative point about this book is that the examples in the book are all in Java. Therefore, if you don’t know Java, navigating this book can prove to be difficult.
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