10 Best Resources To Prepare For System Design Interview | 2023
The world is mostly made up of software systems that power everything efficiently and conveniently behind the scene. We are not even aware of most of this happening, and the fact that most of our daily activities have been automated is evidence of the scale at which software systems operate.
For instance, placing an order at an online store triggers a mechanism that checks out your purchase and makes changes to a stock database simultaneously. The scale is also further compounded by the fact that millions of other shoppers use the website at the same time.
Online stores with millions of customers have software systems that work at an unbelievable scale. The designers of these applications have to be good at their work to create the most effective solutions.
System design is the art of designing software systems known to work at scale without breaking down. Reliable software is important for the modern world, and whenever the software needs to be designed, a system designer has to create a foolproof design.
A system designer has to work around many limitations and obstacles along the way and ensure that the designed systems can conform to modern software standards. The software systems have to be backward compatible with legacy systems and work with other software systems. They also need to have the ability to scale up as the customer deems fit.
This happens almost every day in the modern world, where businesses are growing at an incredible rate. Modern businesses have intense data requirements, and they have to work according to a strict set of standards.
The design of software systems that can handle the growing amounts of information and still perform at an acceptable rate is important. A system designer’s task is to lay the blueprint for these software systems and ensure that all the components can work and scale-up.
With the demand for data in the modern world, businesses are looking for systems that can handle their increased data without giving in. the software systems are also supposed to meet all the requirements of their customers and deliver the services they need efficiently.
Learning to design systems can be important for getting you a job, but it can also teach you how to design systems for the real world. In the real world, information and data are critical assets that must always be treated.
When you know how to design systems to cater to every need of a business, you will be paid huge amounts to do so. Therefore, learning system design is something you should consider for your career and to increase your job prospects.
There are many resources on the internet that can help you advance your knowledge of software systems and how to design reliable applications for the modern world. Following are some of the best resources that we have gathered to help you prepare for a system design interview.
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems are important for the modern world. When you can figure out difficult issues facing modern information systems, you will be able to design reliable and scalable systems from data processing pipelines to databases and much more.
Making the right choices requires that you are properly informed of all the software system requirements. With data forming the basis of most modern business decisions, being able to design systems capable of reliability, maintainability, efficiency, consistency, and scalability is important.
This book has all the information you need to design systems for today. All the challenges you will meet when designing systems are covered in this book, and you also compare different technologies used to implement modern software solutions.
Main Topics
- How to navigate trade-offs
- Modern databases
- Online services architecture
- Fault tolerance
- Consistency
- Scalability
- Distributed systems
- Clean Architecture: A Craftsman’s Guide to Software Structure and Design by Robert C. Martin
Designing software using the proper architecture can save you loads of maintenance and changes further down the line. When you know the universal rules of software architecture taught in this book, you will be able to design better software systems.
Software designers are required to know the rules of software architecture to improve their productivity and ensure that they are designed for better code.
Better software design reduces the amount that the developer will be required to do and the critical factors for success in modern software design projects. This is the essential book for system analysts, designers, and software architects.
Main Topics
- What software architects should be able to achieve and how they can achieve it
- Critical software design principles for data management, addressing function and separating components.
- How programming paradigms restrict what developers are capable of and impose discipline
- Separating detail from what is important
- Implementing high-level structures for clients, databases and embedded systems
- Organizing services and components
- Common design failures and how you can prevent them.
- Systems Analysis and Design (MindTap Course List) by Scott Tilley
Learn the most effective and streamlined way to design information systems while using the latest software development methods.
The digital resources from MindTap will ensure that you have the best demonstration of traditional and modern approaches to designing and analyzing systems. It uses agile and object-oriented methods, which will benefit all kinds of system designers.
It also includes mobile applications and cloud computing which means that people interested in modern software design and applications will find this book to be quite ideal for their needs.
Plenty of exercises included with the book ensure that you understand what is needed for the modern business environment. You will also be able to learn about the modern dynamic business world. You will be a better system designer, and this book gives you practice and clear demonstrations.
Main Topics
- Cloud computing
- Mobile applications
- Databases
- Business applications
- Information systems development
- Dynamic systems design
- Critical thinking
- System Analysis and Design by Dennis, Wixom and Roth
The very depth of content covered by this book will amaze you. It is one of the most outstanding features of the system analysis and design book, intended for system designers who want to create realistic solutions for the modern world.
The book is very detailed and covers everything in great depth to ensure that you understand all the concepts that have been presented in the book.
The three authors all present their viewpoints in the book, which means that you will be able to glean some useful insights from what they present in the book as a system designer. It is one of the ideal ways to prepare for a system design interview and contains all the information you need.
Main Topics
- Planning
- Analysis
- Design
- Implementation
- Data modeling
- Program design
- Process modeling
- Use case analysis
- Architecture designed
- Data storage design
- System Design Interview by Alex Xu
This is an excellent book and preparation material for anyone preparing for a system design interview. It contains step-by-step instructions on how you can tackle any system design question you are asked at the interview.
There are plenty of examples from the real world about how you can design realistic systems and the detailed steps that can be followed to tackle each of the challenges that you will meet.
Main Topics
- What interviewers are looking for
- How to solve any question asked during a system design interview
- Real system design interview questions and their detailed solutions
- Diagrams that explain how various systems work
- Scaling from zero to millions of users
- Designing a web crawler
- Designing a URL shortener
- Designing a notification system
- Grokking the System Design Interview and Grokking the Advanced System Design Interview
Being able to tackle a system design problem successfully is important for anyone seeing to pass the system design interview.
The online course from educative.io has been structured to take you from the simple concepts to the slightly advanced concepts and guidance on how to tackle all the challenges and problems you will meet along the way. The content of this entire course will prepare you for the system design interview and enable you to tackle all the challenges that will be presented to you with ease.
Main Topics
- Master scalability and system design
- System design interviews
- System design problems
- Basics of system design
- Caching
- Load balancing
- Indexing
- Data partitioning
- Understanding Distributed Systems
When you are a system designer working on a large scale, this is one of the essential resources you should have. Whenever you are distributing distributed systems, you should counter for scaling up and down.
The information will enable you to create the best systems fr modern businesses and applications. Making the theory practical is not always as easy as it might seem, but this book will give you a handle on some of the things you will require to be successful as a system designer.
Main Topics
- Communication
- Coordination
- Scalability
- Resiliency
- Operations
- Anatomy of a distributed system
- Testing
- Cracking the coding interview book (system design section)
Preparing for a system design interview requires that you understand all the potential questions that you might be asked out there and the solutions that best fit each one of them.
This is the one book that has an entire section dedicated to system design, and this will ensure that you are well prepared to take on the system design interview and ace all the questions with ease.
The breakdown of the questions and the solutions means that you will be able to prepare better for the interview and understand what you should expect when you get to the interview.
Main Topics
- Interview questions
- Walk-through of deriving each solution
- Hints on how to solve each question
- Proven strategies to tackle interview questions
- How do big companies hire system designers
- Preparing for the soft side of the interview
- System design questions and answers
- Thinking in Systems
This book shows you how to design systems that can be scaled from a personal to a global level. Systems thinking is brought to the realm of computers and information systems.
With the book, you will learn about the system-thinking skills that industry leaders and thought leaders have used. System failures are responsible for most of the problems that we face in our world today.
System thinking is about designing solutions for the entire system instead of pieces and components working in isolation. When getting ready for a system design interview, this is the one book that will prepare you adequately.
Main Topics
- Problem-solving on different scales
- System failures and their causes
- Nurturing positive outcomes
- The science behind global dilemmas
- Finding effective and practical solutions
- System design
- Troubleshooting faulty systems
- Book: Systems Analysis and Design in a Changing World
Designing systems for the modern world requires skills that can take care of changing requirements and a dynamic landscape.
Handling costs and doing things in the right way is also adequately covered in the book to know how to tackle the questions you will be asked at a system design interview.
You also learn the best way to manage costs and conformance with company requirements. Any IT analyst and system designer will find this book the best resource that will prepare them for the modern world and make them competitive against the odds that present themselves.
Main Topics
- Unified Modeling Language
- System Design
- Scalability
- Modern systems development
- Systems analysis
- Changing requirements
- Object-oriented systems development
FAQ
Q: Is the system design interview important?
A: Yes. System design is about real-world software systems and being prepared is important.
Q: Do we need to code in a system design interview?
A: Not necessarily. The questions are mostly in software architecture, so making diagrams will be the main requirement during interviews.
Q: Are System Design Interviews hard?
A: Yes. Employers usually have strict requirements, and as such, they always make a point of asking the most complex questions to test their candidates.
Q: What do you study in system design?
A: Performance, scalability, consistency patterns, availability patterns, databases, caching, and communication. These are some of the core concepts that are taught in system design.
