Hacking the System Design Interview: Real Big Tech Interview Questions and In-depth Solutions

I used this book while preparing for my system design interviews, and it made a huge difference. The concepts are explained in a way that makes them easy to grasp, even for someone without prior large-scale system experience. What I found most useful were the case studies on real-world systems like URL shorteners, rate limiters, and message queues—it helped me understand not just the theory but also how to approach designing scalable systems in practice.The best parts are the chapters about the trade-offs between SQL and NoSQL, caching strategies, and load balancing techniques. Ultimately, this book helped me land a job by giving me a solid foundation to tackle open-ended system design questions. Highly recommend!

I am a software engineer with 12 years of experience. I've got many interviews including system design. I overestimated my architecting skills. After many interviews, I felt that I need to brush up my architecting skills.This book has 39 chapters. 16 chapters are for core concepts. If you are seasoned software engineer, you might not need to read these chapters. These are good for software engineer with 2-5 years of experience. The author wrote chapters easy to understand with various diagrams.The author used 4 chapters for how to tackle system design interview. There are many blog articles and books to provide steps in system design interview. The author also follows the similar approaches. In these chapters, the author suggested 7-step approach.Rest of 16 chapters for for actual system design questions. You might think the number of questions are too small. But if you need actual questions, you can find them from internet, github, youtube, etc.The author explains each questions using the following steps:- clarity the problem and scope the use cases- define data models- make back-of-the-envelope estimates- propose a high-level system design- design components in detail- write out service definitions, APIs, interfaces, and/or classesSo, while read 16 system design questions, you are trained to follow the same steps. After finishing this book, you can apply the same steps on different questions on your own. This will improve your answering skills for the system design interview.One last good point of this book is that the number of pages in this book is less than 250. Compared to other bigger books, you can read tactics and popular questions quickly. After that, you can read the book again, or move to another book.I highly recommend this book

I picked up this book while preparing for system design interviews, and it turned out to be one of the most useful resources I came across. I had gone through a lot of online materials before, but most were either too high-level or too detailed without clear explanations of trade-offs. This book struck a good balance, covering concepts in a way that was easy to apply in an interview setting.The sections on geo-location searching and distributed caching were best chapters for me. The explanations were practical with examples, and were useful in the interview. Compared to what I had read online, these chapters were much more focused on how things actually work at scale, and I could apply to my actual tech stack, which I used to explain in the interview. Thanks.

It's obvious the author knows what they are talking about. Nothing to complain about in terms of the information inside the book. That said, it's pretty unfortunate that some images are of very low quality.

Useful book for my SWE interviews. First half is refresher material, second half is questions.

I’m not the type of person that writes reviews but I had to write this review because I’m surprised that more people don’t know about this book. I had to go through interviews when there were a lot of layoffs happening and I didn't have much experience in tech. The explanations were clear and easy to understand and I felt like I was getting insider knowledge on common interview questions and how to approach them. I actually encountered very similar questions from this book during the interviews!My tips: I studied all the "core components" chapters of the book in week 1, and went through all the systems design questions during week 2. My suggestion is to go through the book multiple times in a couple weeks to really be prepared. It really helped me throughout my interview process! I bought some other online courses and books but found this book to be the most useful prep book for systems design interview.Good luck to all of you!

I was expecting a bit more in-depth analysis and examples. Also, so many mistakes in the book - some technical, some just editorial.