Books

System Design Interview – An insider's guide

Alex Xu | 2020 | ★☆☆☆☆
Read: July 31, 2022

Not recommended. Although many non-fiction books can be considered aggregations of knowledge, they usually do more than that. Xu’s book does not, and perhaps does less.

The book is horrifically, bordering on painfully, formatted with superscripts marked literally with ‘^’, it looks like it was written in Markdown without a second thought.

For the system designs I have read about in detail, such as Dynamo and Google File System this book misrepresents the design or omits key details. An interested reader would be far better reading the original papers or reading online material on systems design, rather than this collection of blog posts that has been published with little editing.