Course Structure for Modern System Design

Structure of the course

This course consists of 40+ chapters. These chapters can be segmented into four distinct sections, as outlined below.

1. Introduction: The introduction section comprises five chapters. The first chapter provides an overview of what System Design is and why it’s important for every developer. The second chapter introduces the System Design interview and explains the role of mock interviews in preparing for it. The third chapter covers preliminary System Design concepts. Next, we discuss key non-functional requirements that every large-scale system should have. Finally, we wrap up this section with a back-of-the-envelope calculation that helps estimate the resources required for design problems.

2. Building blocks: The “Building Blocks” chapter begins with an introductory lesson that presents sixteen different building blocks. Each of these building blocks is explained in an independent chapter. We conclude this section with the "Conclusion”, which also serves as an introduction to the next section.

3. Design problems: This section is the meat of the course and is carefully crafted from sixteen design problems.

4. Epilogue: The “Epilogue” section wraps up this course and is divided into three parts. The first part, spectacular failures, explains how, in the real world, even a small mistake can bring down a large and successful system. Although such failures may be inevitable, we highlight several measures to help mitigate them. The second part provides concluding remarks that summarize what we have learned in the course, and the final part includes additional chapters that offer supplementary resources for further strengthening your System Design concepts.

Note: Although we did our best to keep the chapters independent, our readers will find it useful to read them in the given sequence.

Strengths of the course

While filling some important gaps in other available courses, we believe this course has some key strengths to offer. We summarize the strengths and the advantages this course has over others in the table given below.

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