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1. Whataaaa book!! 5 stars are less!
   One of the best. Cannot recommend this book enough. I’ve used this so much for interviews.Apart from the interviews, this book teaches you such great concepts. It is extremely well written and is a 150% buy for me!I have also recommended this book further and everyone I know has appreciated it!Please buy it 🙂

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2. Great book even for non-backend engineers
   I read Alex’s first book when preparing for my job change and it helped me land a job that I really enjoy. When I heard there was volume 2, I immediately bought it and read it. After doing interviews on both sides as a candidate and an interviewer, I could say these two books are truly useful. This volume 2 book even has broader and deeper technical content than volume 1. I particularly liked the proximity service and hotel reservation chapters.  The proximity service chapter explained some of the most important geospatial algorithms: geohash, quadtree, Google S2, etc. It not only explained how those algorithms work at the high level but also when and why we should use them. Many other resources jump into sharding immediately. This book actually did the math about the memory and storage requirement, and came to the conclusion that sharding may not be required as the memory footprint was usually small for the geospatial index. I really appreciate the book authors doing this as this is exactly what we do in real design. We back our design with napkin math. I also liked the hotel reservation chapter. It defined the problem and scope really well. Not everything needed to be distributed. For a hotel reservation system, the QPS is not high and the challenge of this system lies in handling concurrent requests. This chapter gave a good overview of optimistic locking, pessimistic locking, and caching. I’ve heard about those terms from time to time but never used them in real life. It’s really nice to see how they were actually used in real systems.  Are the books good for interview training and learning some new knowledge? Absolutely yes.  PROs:+ A lot of visuals. There are visuals every 2-3 pages.+ The book is easy to digest despite covering some of the advanced topics such as distributed transactions, S3, stock exchange, etc.+ This book might increase your chance to get into FAANG. CONs:- It doesn’t cover all the system design topics.- It probably will increase your chance to get into FAANG, but you will likely need other resources as well. Other materials for system design:+ For those who like YouTube, the SystemDesignInterview channel is good. It is taught by someone from Amazon(?).+ Uber, Airbnb, Meta eng blogs are pretty awesome. + DDIA book+ Do mock interviews. + Harvard CS75 Lecture 9 Scalability Web Development David Malan. You can find the video on YouTube.+ System Design primer GitHub repository.

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3. Great for interview prep
   Great followup that covers the topics expected during a system design interview and gives you the knowledge you’d need to perform better especially if you lack the FAANG experience in the first place.

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4. Like correcting your swing in Driving Range – Systems Architecture at large
   Disclaimer – I am neither prepping for an interview nor I myself quiz candidates on such open-ended system design topics. Curious after viewing design diagram for a prototypical “Payment Engine” by the author in LinkedIn, I purchased the book. It proved to be a very good investment of money, time and energy. Just ordered Alex’s first book!Contents -SDI-Vol 2 has 13 chapters, on how to design Proximity Service (TenCent influenced), Nearby Friends (Amazon), Distributed Message Queue, Real-time Gaming Leaderboard, Payments Engine, Digital Wallet and a few more. Each spans about 30 pages with clearly drawn workflow diagram, high level design (e.g., API stubs, push vs. pull, choice of data store etc), BOTE calculation to plan throughput/capacity, bullet-pointed wrap up, a one-page mind map of the design and reasonably exhaustive index of useful reference materials.Particularly impressive is the way authors have (a) briefly introduced key, but slightly less mainstream concepts like HdrHistorgram, Hamilton Curve, FIX protocol, Secure-ID etc, and (b) discussed possible alternative solutions (e.g., TC/C vs. Saga for distributed transactions), where applicable. I now work in FinTech and both the “Payment System” (heavily influenced by stripe) and “Digital Wallet” sections are extremely well done, concise and useful abstractions for real enterprise systems.Second-order Applicability -Apart from SDI – and I doubt many companies would ask “Design a service to find nearby friends” to most interviewees – this should be a very useful book for three reasons.One – Flight Simulator mode. If you’re familiar with “core concepts” like Nearest-N neighbors, distributed time-series database, different aggregation windows streaming, Hotspot shard, idempotency and immutability in strongly consistent systems, write-ahead log etc but have not used most of them in “real life”, this book offers a quick walkthrough of systems where it gets used, and how. Investing time here is like practicing how to land during Category 5 storm in a flight simulator. Even if you may never need to land the plane like that, it is good to at least have an idea how it is done.Two – Scalability-Consistency-Availability Triad. This could be a one- or two- week long crash course in “how to scale system”. Especially, early back-of-the-envelope (BOTE) calculations shown here were fundamental arbiter on the final design choice. e.g., Payment Systems do not usually have a problem of scale. They rarely process more than ~10 tps. In such systems, however, each transaction must be “strongly consistent” (no double payment!). Some systems can manage transient loss of availability with minimal operational friction (e.g., blips in a monitoring system are unlikely to cause massive disruption), while some others (e.g., Object Storage) need to build for availability grounds-up. In all real-life systems there are certain “Day Zero Decisions” that can only be done right during design. Going through this book stretches those decision muscles well.Three – Up-leveling (or, clear communication). This is, I guess, where the SDI – or the interview part – comes in to filter out understanding from verbosity. Fundamentally, designing a system is not the most difficult part in engineering software. Decision binding right choice with key players – each with varying ego, objectives and goals – is where effort cycles are spent. This book is a good way to communicate these decisions in a structured, objective and somewhat universal language to both technical and executive leadership. The mind maps accompanying each design were the best parts of the book and they provide a good, repeatable framework to work on similar initiatives. Frameworks rule in complex domain of “system design” as the practitioner has a good starting point with good framework and can then focus on the other unique aspects of the system to be built/managed.Great book. Perhaps the language could have been a tightened a bit here and there with an expert editor. But very very close to 5-stars! Looking forward to a premium publisher doing justice to this series.

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5. A well written, content rich, must have book!
   I have been waiting for this book for months! It has been a while since I’ve done an interview. After joining many interview forums and chat groups, I learn of Alex’s first book, System Design Interview. Almost daily I get notifications about someone’s successful interview story after reading Alex’s book. They were passing interviews with the FAANG+ companies with “flying colors!” The excitement was literally contagious. I ordered this 2nd edition book the day it hit Amazon. I finally understand all the craze. This book is truly unique. It is NOT your ordinary boring technical textbook. The chapters are actually structured like a real life interview. As a reader I can feel myself sitting in the interview room working through the problems step-by-step. I think the best part of each chapter is the “fellow-up” or “extension-to-the-problem” discussions. This is literally how real-life interviews work. Having good understanding of the solution to a problem is important, but understanding alternatives, trade offs, and limitations are even more important. I feel like I’m ready for interviews again. This book very worth while.

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6. Excellent book and a good complement to volume 1. By the way, I highly recommend reading volume 1 before this one unless you are a strong Senior/Staff engineer.

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7. It came as surprising while I started to study the book and then found most of the diagrams are in black and white!! It’s not cheap book, it’s €40I found out when I had a look at an online version of the book

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8. Although some descriptions could be better from a software architecture perspective and the relation qualities-reasoning is not very rigorous, the case studies are OK, they are rich of content, to give students to work in classes.

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9. This book is a very good introduction to System Design, providing very good insights, some basic knowledge is assumed, so, I would suggest to possibly read a more basic book before approaching this one, especially for readers new to the topic. Recommended

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10. Bon livre et bien arrivé

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