Top System Design books recommended by experts

At MentorCruise, we are all about making the most out of the experience of others. As part of that, we've connected and asked dozens of experts and professionals about their favourite System Design books – and here are the answers.

Table of Contents

Fundamentals of System Design

Understanding the concepts of System Design starts with understanding the fundamentals. On your way to mastery, it's crucial for you to understand how certain concepts were derived, and why things work like they do. Starting with these resources is the best way to do so.

Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time

Today, software engineers need to know not only how to program effectively but also how to develop proper engineering practices to make their codebase sustainable and healthy. This book emphasizes this difference between programming and software engineering. How can software engineers manage a living codebase that evolves and responds to changing requirements and demands over the length of its…

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Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

Developers of enterprise applications (e.g reservation systems, supply chain programs, financial systems, etc.) face a unique set of challenges, different than those faced by their desktop system and embedded system peers. For this reason, enterprise developers must uncover their own solutions. In this new book, noted software engineering expert Martin Fowler turns his attention to enterprise …

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Designing Machine Learning Systems

Machine learning systems are both complex and unique. Complex because they consist of many different components and involve many different stakeholders. Unique because they're data dependent, with data varying wildly from one use case to the next. In this book, you'll learn a holistic approach to designing ML systems that are reliable, scalable, maintainable, and adaptive to changing environme…

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Software Architecture: The Hard Parts: Modern Trade-Off Analyses for Distributed Architectures

Salary surveys worldwide regularly place software architect in the top 10 best jobs, yet no real guide exists to help developers become architects. Until now. This book provides the first comprehensive overview of software architecture’s many aspects. Aspiring and existing architects alike will examine architectural characteristics, architectural patterns, component determination, diagramming …

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Systems Analysis and Design

Systems Analysis and Design: An Object-Oriented Approach with UML, 5th Edition by Dennis, Wixom, and Tegarden captures the dynamic aspects of the field by keeping students focused on doing SAD while presenting the core set of skills that every systems analyst needs to know today and in the future. The text enables students to do SAD—not just read about it, but understand the issues so they can…

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Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Interview Questions and Solutions

Now in the 5th edition, Cracking the Coding Interview gives you the interview preparation you need to get the top software developer jobs. This is a deeply technical book and focuses on the software engineering skills to ace your interview. The book is over 500 pages and includes 150 programming interview questions and answers, as well as other advice.

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Additional System Design Reading

These books are not required for you to learn System Design, but they are highly recommended for you to deepen your knowledge.

Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software

Eric Evans has written a fantastic book on how you can make the design of your software match your mental model of the problem domain you are addressing. "His book is very compatible with XP. It is not about drawing pictures of a domain; it is about how you think of it, the language you use to talk about it, and how you organize your software to reflect your improving understanding of it. Eric…

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Head First Design Patterns

Using the latest research in cognitive science and learning theory to craft a multi-sensory learning experience, Head First Design Patterns uses a visually rich format designed for the way your brain works, not a text-heavy approach that puts you to sleep.

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System Design Interview - An Insider's Guide

System design interviews are the most difficult to tackle of all technical interview questions. This book is Volume 1 of the System Design Interview - An insider’s guide series that provides a reliable strategy and knowledge base for approaching a broad range of system design questions. This book provides a step-by-step framework for how to tackle a system design question. It includes many rea…

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Systems analysis and design Alan Dennis

Systems Analysis and Design, 8th Edition offers students a hands-on introduction to the core concepts of systems analysis and systems design. Following a project-based approach written to mimic real-world workflow, the text includes a multitude of cases and examples, in-depth explanations, and special features that highlight crucial concepts and emphasize the application of fundamental theory …

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System Analysis, Design, and Development: Concepts, Principles, and Practices

Written in a practical, easy to understand style, this text provides a step-by-step guide to System Analysis and Engineering by introducing concepts, principles, and practices via a progression of topical, lesson oriented chapters. Each chapter focuses on specific aspects of system analysis, design, and development, and includes definitions of key terms, examples, author's notes, key principle…

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Modern Systems Analysis and Design, EBook, Global Edition

Developing advanced system analysts Prioritizing the practical over the technical, Modern Systems Analysis and Design presents the concepts, skills, methodologies, techniques, tools, and perspectives essential for systems analysts to develop information systems. The authors assume students have taken an introductory course on computer systems and have experience designing programs in at least …

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

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Augment your System Design books

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With 17+ years of experience in the industry, I have worked as a tester, a lead/manager, and as a developer. I have worked on large teams (OneDrive, Power Automate), as well as taking a v1 product from inception to running at a global scale. Delivering interviews, designing systems to work …

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I am a pragmatic software engineer with 20+ years of experience, passionate about simplicity, operational and engineering excellence, DevOps, distributed systems and computer science. I am also a teacher and mentor at heart, which allows me to connect with software engineers, managers and tech product leaders of all levels of …

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👋 Hi! I’m Kuai, currently a Director of Engineering at a Fintech unicorn. With experience at Two Sigma, Google, and Citadel, I have a decade-long track record in tech and finance. I mentor both software engineers and managers, helping them navigate and succeed in their engineering careers. My mentees have …

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👋🏻 Currently sculpting experiences for millions of weekly users as part of BBC's UX design team! 📱I specialise in digital products to achieve data-driven results, approaching my work with a user-centric mindset I enjoy solving complex problems through wireframing, design sprints, usability studies, prototyping, and design systems. My past roles …

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Akram RIAHI is a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with an interest in all things Cloud Native. He is passionate about kubernetes resilience and chaos engineering at scale and is Litmus Chaos leader. A curator of quality tech content, he is the author of several blog posts and organizer of the …

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I designed and built most of HubSpot's observability platform, and have handled realtime (sub-15s latency) streams of millions of datapoints per minute, and terabytes per day. I've improved Amazon's open source balancing algorithm for Kinesis to support downtime-free rebalancing over thousands of concurrent shards. I wrote the first endorsed Java …

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