Beginner-friendly
System Design Workbook
Learn system design from the ground up — clear explanations, real examples, and plain-English analogies. No prior experience needed.
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The Workbook
Start with the fundamentals
First lesson: What Is System Design?
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The Cheatsheet
Already know the basics? Jump to the condensed, scannable reference of every pattern, number, and trade-off.
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- 1What Is System Design?What the discipline actually is, why interviews test it, and how to think about trade-offs.6m
- 2Latency vs ThroughputTwo numbers people constantly mix up — and the difference matters in every design.6m
- 3Availability, Reliability & SLAsWhat "five nines" really means, and the promises behind SLA / SLO / SLI.5m
- 4The CAP Theorem (and PACELC)Why a distributed system can't have it all when the network breaks — explained plainly.5m
- 5Consistency ModelsStrong vs eventual consistency, and the in-between guarantees that make apps feel correct.6m
- 6Scaling: Vertical vs HorizontalBigger machine vs more machines — the first fork in the road for any growing system.5m
- 7Load Balancing BasicsHow traffic gets spread across servers, and the algorithms that decide who handles what.5m
- 8Caching BasicsThe single highest-leverage trick in system design — plus the traps that bite beginners.6m
- 9Back-of-the-Envelope EstimationTurn 'a billion users' into QPS, storage, and server counts in under five minutes.5m
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Core Building Blocks
0/10 doneDatabases, caches, queues, CDNs — the components you wire together in a design.
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Design Patterns
0/27 doneReusable solutions to recurring problems, grouped by category. Also available as a quick-reference cheatsheet.
46 lessons available · more on the way