For specifically preparing for interviews at FAANG or similar tech giants, this is a must-read . It provides the "cheat codes" for the interview format, though it should be supplemented with real-world engineering blogs (like Netflix Tech Blog or High Scalability) to develop a deeper architectural intuition.
– It gives good practical trade-offs but won’t teach you vector clocks, CRDTs, or detailed consensus algorithms. For senior roles, you may need Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Kleppmann) as a supplement. system design interview alex hu pdf
– Covers newer patterns (e.g., distributed transactions, leader-follower, bloom filters, Paxos/Raft at a high level) and more advanced case studies (e.g., Zoom, Google Drive, real-time gaming leaderboard). For specifically preparing for interviews at FAANG or