Acing the System Design Interview

by Zhiyong Tan

The system design interview can be the hardest part of the software engineering hiring process. This practical book gives you the insights, skills, and practice you need to ace the toughest system design interview questions and land the job and salary you want.

In Acing the System Design Interview you will master a structured and organized approach to present system design ideas

• Scaling databases to support heavy traffic
• Distributed transactions techniques to ensure data consistency
• Services for functional partitioning such as API gateway, service mesh, and metadata
• Common API paradigms including REST, RPC, and GraphQL
• Caching strategies, including their tradeoffs
• Logging, monitoring, and alerting concepts that are critical in any system design

The system design interview is one of the hardest challenges you’ll face in the software engineering hiring process. Their open-ended nature often makes nailing this interview more art than science—and notoriously difficult to prepare for. Never fear! In Acing the System Design Interview , Zhiyong Tan reveals his unique system design interview techniques that have earned him job offers from Amazon, Apple, PayPal, and Uber. The book goes well beyond typical soft skills. You’ll dive deep into the common technical topics that arise during interviews, learning how to apply them to mentally perfect different kinds of systems.

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

About the technology

Any senior role in software engineering will include system design interviews in the hiring process. Built around open-ended questions with no standard answer, these interviews test how well you understand the design of complex systems. You’ll need to demonstrate that you can balance tradeoffs to design a system that both meets current requirements and is flexible to future modifications and extensions–all in a 50 minute interview!

About the book

Acing the System Design Interview teaches you how to effectively demonstrate your system design expertise in an interview environment. In this in-depth guide, author Zhiyong Tan shares what he’s learned on both sides of the interview table. The book’s serious technical overviews cover everything there is to know about system design—from the frameworks for functional partitioning, to different API paradigms.

You’ll learn how to quickly assess a question, identify an advantageous approach, and then clearly articulate it to an interviewer. A structured approach to preparing for your interview, handy note-taking techniques, and self-evaluation templates help you prep and assess how you did, and improve your future performance. Along the way, you’ll also learn appropriate questions to ask your interviewer and methods to take good interview notes.

About the reader

For software engineers, software architects, and engineering managers looking to advance their careers.

About the author

Zhiyong Tan is a manager at PayPal. Previously, he worked as a senior full-stack engineer at Uber, as a data engineer at small startups, and as a software engineer at Teradata. Over the years, he has been on both sides of the table in numerous system design interviews. Zhiyong has also received prized job offers from prominent companies such as Amazon, Apple and Bytedance/TikTok.

Genres: Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, Programming, Nonfiction, Technical, Software

472 pages, Paperback

Published January 30, 2024

Reviews

[yigitalp ertem · Rating 3 out of 5]

aced system design interview count: 0

[Zbyszek Sokolowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is interesting, and this is quite difficult to asses it with clear conscience.

First part is devoted to brief introduction to a walkthrough of system design concepts. This part is introduction to the system design interview then brief summary about system design. This part is really great. The author is reminding scaling systems, caching, systems partitioning. The knowledge is transferred in concise manner, easy to read and entertaining. At the end of each chapter there are really useful links to high quality resources . This part is highly recommended and worth reading by no means.

Then beginning of part 2 is a bit disappointment. For me chapter 7 is very weak, lack of structure. Some knowledge transferred like river stream. No pace, boring. Next chapters are better, and all in all book is worth to be read however I can't recommend it as solely one source for system design interview. On the other hand when a candidate knows how to play his role and has decent knowledge then I can recommend it. Plus solutions depicted in book are pretty interesting.

So all in all it is worth reading.

[Sergey Moshnikov]

This is a good introduction to the system design. The book focuses on how to conduct the system design interview, which parts to focus on, which questions to expect.

Part 1 is an introduction to the topic of system design. It gives you an overview of current technology landscape. It doesn't go into much details, but provides references to where to find more information.

Part 2 contains a few different examples on the design of different types of systems. Again, it doesn't go into much details, and sometimes it's not clear how the author came to specific design decisions. Can be a bit hard to read at times, due to the density of the material.

Overall, I could recommend this book as an introduction to the topic of system design and as a good source to prepare for the system design interview. However, to get more in-depth understanding, be prepared to dive deeper into the reference material provided in the book.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great resource for learning web service system design. It is not only a resource to prepare you for the job interview, but also a resource for participating to system design discussions in the organization that you will join.

The book consists of two parts:
* Part one covers 'background material' that could remind you of notions you saw in courses on distributed systems and cloud computing (if you happen to have taken those classes).
* Part two consists of chapters that are centered around design question statement that could come up in an interview: for example "design Flickr". The focus is on being able to discuss approaches and make tradeoffs.

In a nutshell, to me this book seems a valuable resource for persons who want to deepen their knowledge of web service system design.

[Victor Declerk · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a must read for anyone preparing for technical interviews that involve system design, but also for those looking to improve their system design skills.
The book covers a wide range of topics relevant to system design, and it goes beyond theoretical concepts and offers practical advice, such as how to estimate system capacity, choose appropriate data storage solutions, and handle API design.

[J. Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bit of a slog. Frontloaded with good info, seems an excellent starting point. Case studies feel completely dry and a more thorough treatment of strategies to resolve non-functional requirements would have been welcomed.

To be fair, this can be a dry topic and there is a tremendous amount of ground to cover. This book makes an admirable attempt to fill a necessary niche.

[AbdulKarim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is excellent for you if you are preparing for a system design interview and are new to this domain. It's like a mini encyclopedia covering the most popular system design concepts. It feels rushed at places, but as a reader, you are now exposed to this new concept that you can research.

I highly recommend this for beginners.

[Mikhail Filatov · Rating 2 out of 5]

The answers to questions are not realistic-too many details and topics for 45 minutes, many answers are a sort of “I want to apply this architecture here” vs. designing what is really needed. And sometimes the author puts his braindump -e.g., only he knows why he described different types of taxes in the chapter about Designing Flickr.

[Jason Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not done with the book, but it is a useful book for someone who already has some experience doing software development. Because the material covered is so vast and technical, there are times when some claims are made without lengthy justifications. This approach is jarring for beginners, but unavoidable in order to cram all the material in a single book.

[WEIJIE ZHU · Rating 3 out of 5]

The structure of the book is pretty clear. However, the way the author explains detail is not straightforward and its really hard to follow through. For most of the overall design part, there are too much details which cause confusion. Sometime when talking about high level design, the author starts talking about details like SQL.

[Elie De Brauwer · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I quite enjoyed the first path (focusing on the individual topics), the second part deals with use-cases which makes sense because it's applying the topics from the first part. But this has two implications, it causes the first part to be a bit 'rushed' and it causes for quiet some repetition and secondly it's just nog fun to read.

[Laud · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book quite comprehensive and it is one that I will recommend on this topic.

[Andres Sacco · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like the approach of the book because it covers different topics that could appear in an interview.

[To Nghia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent resource for System Design.

[Kiran Anantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-have reference for all software engineers. Provides you with a structure and patterns to tackle any system design interview and helps you in your everyday design tasks.

[Ankur · Rating 4 out of 5]

good book

good content and nicely explained complicated system design concepts along with references and resources it is taken from. i would recommend the book.

[Jfzhang · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first part summarizes many common concepts that will be useful in the system design interview. While the second part lists some examples that I feel are not focused. It is a bit tedious and not suitable for an interview where it usually focuses on key functions.