Название: Acing the System Design Interview (Final Release)
Автор: Zhiyong Tan
Издательство: Manning Publications
Год: 2024
Страниц: 473
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 12.1 MB

The system design interview is one of the hardest challenges you’ll face in the software engineering hiring process. This practical book gives you the insights, the skills, and the hands-on 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 like:

Scaling applications to support heavy traffic
Distributed transactions techniques to ensure data consistency
Services for functional partitioning such as API gateway and service mesh
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
Communication skills that demonstrate your engineering maturity

Don’t be daunted by the complex, open-ended nature of system design interviews! In this in-depth guide, author Zhiyong Tan shares what he’s learned on both sides of the interview table. You’ll dive deep into the common technical topics that arise during interviews and learn how to apply them to mentally perfect different kinds of systems.

About the technology

The system design interview is daunting even for seasoned software engineers. Fortunately, with a little careful prep work you can turn those open-ended questions and whiteboard sessions into your competitive advantage! In this powerful book, Zhiyong Tan reveals practical interview techniques and insights about system design that have earned developers job offers from Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, PayPal, and Uber.

About the book

Acing the System Design Interview is a masterclass in how to confidently nail your next interview. Following these easy-to-remember techniques, you’ll learn to quickly assess a question, identify an advantageous approach, and then communicate your ideas clearly to an interviewer. As you work through this book, you’ll gain not only the skills to successfully interview, but also to do the actual work of great system design.

What's inside

Insights on scaling, transactions, logging, and more
Practice questions for core system design concepts
How to demonstrate your engineering maturity
Great questions to ask your interviewer

Part 1 of the book begins with an informative survey of critical aspects of system design. Starting with non-functional requirements, you’ll learn about many of the common dimensions that you must keep in mind while considering system design tradeoffs. Following an elaboration on , you will walk through how to organize the application programming interface (API) specification to explain how your system design addresses the use cases of the interview problem statement. Behind the API, you’ll learn several industry best practices for organizing the system data model using industry-standard datastores and patterns for managing distributed transactions. And beyond addressing the prima facie use cases, you’ll learn about key aspects of system operation, including modern approaches to observability and log management.

In part 2, ride along for 11 distinct system design problems, from text messaging to Airbnb. In each interview problem, you can pick up new skills on how to tease out the right questions to organize the non-functional system requirements, followed by what tradeoffs to invest in further discussion. System design is a skill set often rooted in an experience that lends itself well to learning from prior art and examples based on others’ experiences. If you internalize the many lessons and wisdom from the examples presented in this book, you’ll be well prepared for even the most challenging system design interview problems.