Top Books on System Design
February 27, 2026 ยท View on GitHub
- System Design Interview, Vol. 1, 2nd Ed. - Alex Xu - 2020 - The most practical intro to system design with clear frameworks and real examples.
- System Design Interview, Vol. 2 - Alex Xu & Sahn Lam - 2022 - Deeper dives: Google Maps, ad click aggregation, stock exchange, and distributed message queues.
- The System Design Primer - Donne Martin - 2024 - Free, comprehensive GitHub guide covering scalability, reliability, and trade-off thinking.
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications - Martin Kleppmann - 2017 - Foundation for system design: storage, streams, consistency, and real-world trade-offs.
- Building Microservices, 2nd Ed. - Sam Newman - 2021 - Microservice design, integration, and deployment for scalable systems.