Review — Is Grokking the Advanced System Design Interview on DesignGuru.io worth it?

Is Grokking Advanced System Design Interview on DesignGuru is worth it? Yes, its worth it to learn advanced System design concepts.

javinpaul
Javarevisited
10 min readSep 24, 2022

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Is Grokking Advanced System Design Interview on Educative worth it? Review
image_credit — DesignGuru.io

Hello guys, if you are preparing for System Design interview and want to wondering whether Grokking the Advanced System Design Course on Designguru.io is worth your time or not then you have come to the right place.

Earlier, I have not only shared best System Design courses but also reviewed DsignGuru’s popular Grokking the System Design course as well as Educative’s new Grokking the Modern System design course and in this article I am going to review DesignGuru.io’s second most popular System design course.

But, before I give my review of DesignGuru’s Grokking Advanced System Design Interview, let me tell you a little bit more about this course so that we are on the same page.

This course was earlier available on Educative but now its exclusively available on Deisgnguru.io, a popular online portal by Arslan Ahmad for coding interview preparation.

As you must already know if you have ever sat for a software engineering interview, system design questions are an integral part of the process. System design plays a very important part as it is considered more important than solving coding problems.

And in order to impress your potential employers, you have to be able to show your real design skills and convince them that you are able to work with complex design systems.

Also, I don’t have to say that giving a good performance in a system design interview will give you a more senior job profile with greater pay and stability. That is where this course comes into the picture.

DesignGuru’s Grokking Advanced System Design Interview is basically an architectural review of famous distributed systems. The main aim of this course is to filter out very important design details that can be very relevant to system design interview questions.

The course also has a wonderful list of system design patterns that make up the common system design problems as well as the solutions that different distributed systems have developed over time.

Another key feature of this course is that it is entirely text-based. You will not see any flashy videos here. This makes sure that you stay focused for longer periods of time. You also do not have to sit through hours of boring video lectures.

Is Grokking the Advanced System Design course worth it

Is Grokking the Advanced System Design Interview Course on DesignGuru.io Really worth it?

You can think of this course as basically a sequel to the Grokking The System Design Interview course on the DesignGuru platform, which is also one of the most popular System Design courses out there.

As you must have guessed from the course title, this course takes things a bit further. You will not see any run-of-the-mill system design interview questions here.

The course is basically made up of summaries that describe the inner workings of some of the most popular, widely used, and widely deployed distributed systems out there. For starters, you will get to learn about systems like Dynamo, Cassandra, Kafka, Chubby, GFS, HDFS, and Big Table.

1 .1 System Design Case Studies

The course is divided into two main parts: System Design Case Studies and System Design Patterns.

In the first part, you will learn the architecture of a popular and carefully choose distributed systems like:

  1. Key-value store: Dynamo
  2. No-SQL wide column stores: Cassandra and BigTable
  3. Distributed messaging and streaming system: Kafka
  4. Distributed file storage systems: GFS and HDFS
  5. Distributed coordination and locking service: Chubby (similar to Zookeeper)

As you must have already guessed, most of these systems belong to the realm of Big Data. This will help you implement concepts from distributed systems theory.

Another interesting feature of the course is that it will simplify complex systems for you by breaking them down into small blocks and asking you to build them back together. This is really good for preparing any system design interview in depth and if you also think so, then you should join this course.

Here is the link to join this courseGrokking Advanced System Design Interview

How to design a distributed Messaging Queue like kafka

1.2 System Design Patterns

The best thing about this Advanced System Design Course on DesignGuru is that you will learn about System Design Patterns like Bloom Filter, Consistent hashing etc.

Here is the full list of System Design Patterns you will learn in the second part of this advanced System Design course:

1. Bloom Filters
2. Consistent Hashing
3. Quorum
4. Leader and Follower
5. Write-ahead Log
6. Segmented Log
7. High-Water Mark
8. Lease
9. Heartbeat
10. Gossip Protocol
11. Phi Accrual Failure Detection
12. Split Brain
13. Fencing
14. Checksum
15. Vector Clocks
16. CAP Theorem
17. PACELC Theorem
18. Hinted Handoff
19. Read Repair
20. Merkle Trees

Once you know what these patterns are how you can use them to solve common System design problems then half the batter is already won.

You will also be able to understand all the complex distributed systems by learning about the concepts behind them. You will get access to loads of public documentation.

The course excels in extracting the very important details of the design and working of these systems and presenting them before you in a mini-digest so that you can go through all of it and impress your interviewers.

Here is the link to join this courseGrokking Advanced System Design Interview

20 Essential System Design Patterns for programmers

6 Best System Design Courses for Tech Interviews on Educative and DesignGuru

If you are serious about preparing for System Design Interview in depth then here are other best System Design course for beginners and experienced developers from Educative. It includes beginner and advanced level System Design course you can join to prepare for System design interview.

1. Grokking The System Design Interview (Now on DesignGuru.io)

This is a wonderful course that will teach you everything you need to know about system designing along with grokking from absolute scratch. In this way, it is absolutely perfect for complete beginners.

Course Duration: 3 hours
Course Rating: 4.6 stars out of 5
Course Instructor: Educative
Course Price: $20 per month

It is a perfect starting guide for beginners looking to enter the amazing world of system design.

Here is the link to join this course — Grokking The System Design Interview

Grokking The System Design Interview discount

2. Grokking Modern System Design For Software Engineers

This course will act as a great brief introduction to the amazing world of modern system design. It is perfect for beginners as you will learn about system design from absolute scratch. You will learn exactly what system design is and why is it used.

Course Duration: 2 hours
Course Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Course Instructor: Educative
Course Price: $20 per month

Here is the link to join this course — Grokking Modern System Design

Grokking Modern System Design For Software Engineers review

3. Grokking The Object-Oriented Design Interview (DesignGuru.io)

This is a great course that will help you take your skills in object-oriented system design to another level. You will be able to do this by using object-oriented system design rather than the traditional system design techniques.

Course Duration: 2 hours
Course Rating: 4.4 stars out of 5
Course Instructor: Educative
Course Price: $20 per month

The course will teach you how to pass your system design interview. You will also learn how to get jobs at Google. Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon.

Here is the link to join this course — Grokking The Object-Oriented Design Interview

Grokking The Object-Oriented Design Interview review

4. Machine Learning System Design

This is an exciting course that will teach you everything you need to know about the basics of machine learning system design in the shortest time possible.

The course will also teach you everything you need to know about machine learning and system design.

Course Duration: 1 hour
Course Rating: 4.6 stars out of 5
Course Instructor: Khang Phem
Course Price: $20 per month

Here is the link to join this courseMachine Learning System Design

How to design a food delivery application like GrabFood, Zomato or UberEAT

6. System Design Interview: Doordash Design

In this fantastic course, you will learn everything you need to know about the different components of system design for getting hired by Doordash. You will start the course by learning about the basics of system design.

Then you will move on to understand what exactly is system design. By the end of this course, you will be able to get a very good job at Doordash.

Course Duration: 2 hours
Course Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Course Instructor: Partha Pratim Sanyal
Course Price: $20 per month

Here is the link to join this courseSystem Design Interview: Doordash Design

How to design DoorDash app

Is Grokking the Advanced System Design Interview Course Really worth it?

If you ask me, the course is definitely worth it because there is hardly any course where you will learn about System Design Patterns and Case studies together. In fact, I hardly find any course which covers System Design patterns.

When I discover this course, I got the similar feeling when I first discovered Grokking the Coding Interview: Patterns for Coding Questions, where I learned 15 underlying patterns to interview questions, like Sliding Window, 2-pointer pattern etc.

This course is as valuable as like that and whether you are preparing for System design interview or not, I highly recommend you to join this course to learn about these essential System Design Patterns as well as how Big Data, Kafka, Messaging Queue, Dynamo etc work. The knowledge you gain in this course will certainly make you a better developer.

If you want to learn more, see here — System Design Interview: Doordash Design

System Design PAtterns for interviews

That’s all in this review of Grokking the Advanced System Design Interview Course from DesignGuru.io. In short, the course is definitely worth it for its in-depth coverage of system design concepts and popular system design questions.

If you liked this review of DesignGuru’s popular Grokking Advanced System Design Interview course, feel free to share it with your friends and family. I have no doubt that this course will transform you from a complete novice to an expert system designer within a matter of weeks or months.

By the way if you want to join multiple System Design courses on DesignGuru then you can also checkout their All Course Bundle where you get access to all of their System design and coding interview courses for big discount. You can also use code coupon GURU for 30% discount.

And, if you want to join Educative courses then you can take an Educative Subscription (recommended) to get access to their 250+ high quality, text-based, interactive courses to learn key skills for coding interviews, software development, and technology.

Other Articles You May Like to Explore

Thanks for reading this article so far. If you like the review of Grokking the Advanced System Design Interview course, then please share them with your friends and colleagues, they will appreciate it. If you have any questions or feedback, then please drop a note.

P. S. — If you are looking for alternatives of Educative System Design Courses then I also suggest you to checkout Frank Kane’s Mastering the System Design Interview course on Udemy. Frank is an ex-hiring manager and know what it takes to crack System design interview of those big FAANG companies.

Another great alternative is , you can also join Alex Yu’s System Design Interview — An insider’s guide and ByteByteGo for a complete System design Interview preparation.

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javinpaul
Javarevisited

I am Java programmer, blogger, working on Java, J2EE, UNIX, FIX Protocol. I share Java tips on http://javarevisited.blogspot.com and http://java67.com