Skip to main content

Reference and Selective Reading

You do not need to read the source books front-to-back for this module. Use the concept pages and practice pages first. Open these local chunks only when you need alternate exposition, a worked concrete example, or a deeper reference lane.

Source Roles

Source	Role	Why it is here
System Design Primer (donnemartin)	Primary local source	Compact, canonical reference for the components on every box diagram (LB, CDN, cache, DB, queue) and for the latency numbers
Fundamentals of Software Architecture (Richards & Ford)	Selective support	Best vocabulary for architecture characteristics, trade-off analysis, and component-based thinking
System Design Interview (Alex Xu; external)	Primary reference text outside the local chunks	Use for end-to-end walk-throughs of classic problems when you want a worked-example alternative to the concept pages

Read Only If Stuck

Cluster 1: Frame the Problem

Cluster 2: High-Level Design

Cluster 3: Deep Dive

Cluster 4: Stress Test the Design

Cluster 5: Communicate and Decide

Optional Deep Dive

SDP 22: Security -- only a pointer in this module; handled in detail in S9
FoSA: Fitness functions -- for treating non-functional requirements as automatically-verified rules
FoSA: Monolithic vs distributed architectures -- useful before S8M2 microservices
FoSA: Architectural thinking -- re-read after completing the module to internalize mindset shift

Concept-to-Source Map

Primary concept	Best source if stuck	Why this source
Understanding the requirements	FoSA: Extracting characteristics from requirements	Strongest formal account of going from requirement text to architecture pressure
Back-of-envelope estimation	SDP 23: Powers of two and latency numbers	Canonical numbers; worked with the estimation walk
Identifying the hard parts	FoSA: Identifying architectural characteristics	Best formal treatment of selecting what to prioritize
Draw the box diagram	SDP 25: Real-world architectures	Catalog of proven high-level shapes to compare against
Choose a storage approach	SDP 15: SQL or NoSQL	Short, correct decision framing; pairs with SDP 12-14
Place the caches, CDN, load balancers	SDP 17: Cache update patterns	Strongest single chunk on cache semantics
Decompose each component	FoSA: Discovering components	Best treatment of decomposition heuristics
Data model design	SDP 13: Database federation and sharding	Best practical source for partitioning and index trade-offs
Concurrency, consistency, transaction boundaries	SDP 05: Consistency patterns	Short, correct framing of the available consistency models
Scale the hot path: 10x and 100x	SDP 02: Performance vs scalability	Compact statement of what scale actually changes
Reason about failure	SDP 06: Availability patterns	Best catalog of failover, replication, and health-check patterns
Identify bottlenecks and SPOFs	SDP 09: Load balancer + SDP 13: Database federation and sharding	Most SPOFs in modern designs live at the LB or the DB partition boundary
The four-phase interview/review structure	SDP 01: How to approach a system design interview	Canonical short reference for the phase structure
Articulating trade-offs	FoSA: Analyzing trade-offs	Best formal treatment of trade-off reasoning
Producing a design doc worth reviewing	FoSA: Architectural thinking	Captures the senior-reviewer mindset a doc must serve

Source Roles
Read Only If Stuck
Optional Deep Dive
Concept-to-Source Map