Is Grokking the System Design Interview worth it? Review
If you are preparing for System Design Interview then Grokking the System Design Interview course is definitely worth covering system design concepts, diagram, case studies, and detailed solution of System design questions.
Hello guys, If you are preparing for System Design Interview and looking for best System Design courses or wondering whether Grokking the System Design Interview course on Design Guru is worth it or not then you have come to the right place.
In the past, I have shared the best System design courses for coding interviews, system design books, System Design Websites, System Design Cheat Sheet, as well 25 Software Design questions and Today, I will review one of the top system design courses for technical discussions, Grokking the System Design Interview by Design Gurus.
When I first started preparing for System design interviews there were not many resources available, I searched in Udemy for System design course only to find outdated, half-baked course, YouTube has some video's but there is no resource which can provide a well structured preparation required for interviews.
At that time I come across Grokking the System Design Interview Course on Educative by Design Guru and immediately fell in love with it. The course was well structured, detailed, and discussed popular System design questions with in-depth analysis and their use of diagram was amazing. DesignGuru’s interactive learning platform was another cherry on cake.
Since then situation has changed a lot, there are now many dedicated System design platforms and websites like ByteByteGo, Exponent, DesignGuru, which even provide mock interviews for FAANG companies and even Udemy has got amazing System design courses like Mastering the System Design Interview by Frank Kane (Ex Amazon Hiring Manager) and even Educative got two sequels of System design interview but it sill remain one of my favorite resource.
If you are thinking to join this course but not sure, then read on, I have shared my thoughts and reviewed the course on its merit of what it offers for the price it charged and time it takes.
And more importantly DesignGuru’s has now moved their System Design courses from Educative to their own website DesignGuru.io
Is Grokking the System Design Interview Course Worth it?
Today we are going to review a course that focuses on System Design! System Design is crucial for coding interviews! And it’s also one of the most challenging topics to master.
By the way, if you are in hurry and If you are preparing for System Design Interview then Grokking the System Design Interview course is definitely worth covering system design concepts, diagram, case studies, and detailed solution of System design questions. You can go and join this course and you will not regret.
And, if you have time, let’s dee dive into this interesting course.
So what’s the wait? Let’s start!
1. A Text Based System Design Course
If you’ve recently interviewed at a large tech business, you’ve almost certainly gone through the most popular course on Educative.io (now on DesignGurus.io), “Grokking the System Design Interview.”
This text-based, interactive system design course is one of the best in the market. Thousands of people have gone through this course to learn essential system design concepts approaches and see the solution to frequently asked System design questions.
In reality, this course was essential in popularizing Educative.io, with revenues from the course accounting for more than half of the company’s income in its early days.
The success of this course encouraged a sequel, and DesignGuru.io now also have a System Design course called Grokking the Advanced System Design, which just takes the system design interview preparation to the next level.
2. What does Grokking the System Design Cover and how well?
This is one of the best System Design courses in the market. It is a text-based and interactive course. It provides a step-by-step approach to mastering System Design Interviews.
They have carefully selected a collection of questions that have been regularly asked by top organizations, and they also provide extensive experience in dealing with any system design challenge.
The course also follows a predetermined framework for each design challenge, which includes thinking about the big picture, security, API design, database architecture, expected demand, capacity estimation, and then delving into the subtleties particular to each situation. This pattern may be seen throughout the course since it is applied to each question.
At Big tech companies like FAANG engineering interviews, system design rounds have been a common occurrence. When Facebook’s stock began to rise, and everyone in Silicon Valley wanted to work there, there were no resources available to prepare for the design round.
The interview bible at the time was ex-Googler Gayle McDowell's Cracking the Coding Interview book but it didn’t cover any software design topics. The Grokking System Design Interview course immediately filled this need.
The issue you’re presumably asking is whether the course is worth the money and time you’re going to spend on it. The answer is that it is debatable. If you’re a software engineer who hasn’t dealt with big scale distributed systems or isn’t familiar with scaling software, this course has a reasonable possibility of getting you a raise at your next job.
Here is the link to join this course — Grokking the System Design Interview
Even though most of us are doing software development, it’s unseemly for most of us to pick up a book about how Cassandra uses Consistent Hashing or how HDFS achieves High Availability for Namenodes in the case of a Network Partition. Sure, we understand Pythagoras’ theorem, but we’re baffled when it comes to the CAP theorem.
If the technical terminology in the last two statements is unfamiliar to you and you have an interview scheduled in less than a month, you should enroll in the course immediately soon. It will immediately familiarize you with the principles of developing large-scale distributed systems.
Btw, DesignGuru.io also have this nice System Design Template, which is a really great resource to learn about essential System Design Concepts:
3. System Design Topics and Concepts You will learn in this course
Here is a list of essential System design topics and concepts which you will learn in this course:
- Important characteristics of Distributed Systems
- Load Balancing
- Caching
- Data Partitioning
- Indexes
- Proxies
- Redundancy and Replication
- SQL vs. NoSQL
- CAP Theorem
- PACEL Theorem
- Consistent Hashing
- Long-Polling vs WebSockets vs Server-Sent Events
- Bloom Filters
- Quorum
- Leader and Follower
- Heartbeat
- Checksum
You can see that the course covers some of the most essential topics when it comes to designing a real-world system. This list of topics was worth enough for me to join this course and it seems they have now added more content into this also Grokking the Advanced System design interview course expand the concept you are going to learn in this course.
4. Solution of Frequently asked System Design Questions
Another reason why I joined this course was that I was looking for solutions for frequently asked system design questions like how to design a Trade position aggregator, or Twitter, Facebook, or Amazon, or design a vending machine.
More importantly, I was looking for guidance to approach such problems and this course provides a step-by-step approach to solve system design problems.
Here is a list of frequently asked software design questions that are covered in this course:
- Designing a URL Shortening service like TinyURL, bit.ly etc
- Designing Pastebin (an online coding IDE)
- Designing Instagram (photo-sharing app and social network)
- Designing Dropbox
- Designing Facebook Messenger
- Designing Twitter
- Designing Youtube or Netflix
- Designing Typeahead Suggestion
- Designing an API Rate Limiter
- Designing Twitter Search
- Designing a Web Crawler
- Designing Facebook’s Newsfeed
- Designing Yelp or Nearby Friends
- Designing Uber backend
- Designing Ticketmaster
You can see that most of these questions are what you will expect in FAANG company’s interviews. In fact, many of them are taken from Google, NetFlix, Uber, and Amazon interviews. By solving these questions you will learn a lot of useful concepts which will serve you lifelong as a software developer and software architect.
What makes Grokking the System Design Interview worth it?
If you’re still not sure about this course, your initial thinking will be, “Why can’t I just Google all of that information?” You certainly can; the course is neither propriety nor new.
The actual value of the course is the compilation of the most often asked System Design interview questions, as well as the mental process to use while answering them
Here are some Pros and cons about the course that you guys must know before proceeding forward.
Pros:
- It includes a large number of popular designs.
- Basic, intermediate, and advanced topics are all explained in detail.
- There are over 100 pictures to go along with the questions.
Cons:
- The Design challenges are, of course, grouped at random, and no special ranking process is employed.
- The price is not what everyone can afford. (recently, there is a discount going on for Indian students, do check it out).
Here is the link to join this course — Grokking the System Design Interview
5. What I liked about this System Design Course
One of the best things about this course is that mentors from FAANG and other top-tier MNCs give instruction for the course. The mentors educate and advise you based on their own personal experiences.
They utilize their real-life experience in their firms as a reference to prioritize the types of questions to familiarize you with.
The mentors assist you with all aspects of the interview process by providing placement support. This ensures that the student receives clear instructions and a plan for approaching the job application process. 1:1 mock interviews, profile optimization, and profile development are all examples of this placement help.
There’s also the Flexible Pass option, which is helpful if you’re a working professional who wants to learn while still working. It does this by giving you access to classes from various batches as well as the LMS portal, where you may watch recorded lectures at your leisure.
All of the lessons are live interactive sessions in which you can communicate with the mentors in real-time, and there are also one-on-one doubt clearing sessions to clear out any remaining doubts.
If you are unable to continue with the lessons, you will be eligible for a full refund if you notify us within the first two weeks of the course’s start date.
When you visit the website, an expert reviews your profile and then connects you with a mentor who will take you to the course that best meets your needs.
Is Grokking The System Design Interview worth it?
As a result, if all you want to do is prepare for the sort of System Design questions that will be asked during the technical interviews, particularly on FAANG companies then Grokking the System Design Interview course is worth it.
It’s also worth joining for people who are not familiar with System design and software design concepts like SQL vs NoSQL, Scalability, resiliency, fault tolerance, active-active, and active-passive architecture.
For example, Java developers who want to become software architects can join this course to improve their knowledge of software design and system design.
However, keep in mind that some of these subjects have grown outdated and may no longer be relevant.
If you want not only placement help but also a slew of additional benefits, I also recommend enrolling in the Advanced Problem Solving with System Design course, along with this one. I hope you guys are now ready to decide what to do and how to proceed.
How to join Grokking the System Design Course?
By the way it comes to joining this course, you have two options, you can either buy this course directly or you can get all of DesignGuru.io’s coding interview courses as a bundle which offer big discount.
For those who are only interested on System Design Interview topics, they can also buy all the System design courses, including Grokking the System Design Interview and Grokking the Advanced System Design Interview together for a discount as best of System Design Interview bundle.
And, if you want to join the Grokking Modern System Design for Software Engineers & Managers course, its available on Educative and not on DesignGuru.io, for that either you need to buy that course individually or get a Educative subscription to join that course.
They also provide a 7-day free trail which is another way you can explore Educative platform for free.
That’s all in this review of Grokking the System Design Interview Course. This is no doubt that it is one of best online course to prepare for System design interview. I think, Grokking the System Design course is totally worth of its price.
It’s one of the most interactive, comprehensive, and up-to-date course for System design and for all essential system design concepts, diagram, case studies, and detailed solution of common System design questions given in this course in a structured manner Grokking the System Design course is definitely worth it for the price you pay.
It’s one of the best resource to prepare well for System design interview and if you are serious about your tech interview, you must see it before its too late.
Hope you guys now have clarity on what to do next and if you guys need this course or not. So, happy designing, until next article, keep learning.
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Thanks for reading this article so far. If you like the review of Grokking the 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 to learn System Design in depth, then you can also check out this list of best System Design Courses to build your foundations and fill gaps in your understanding. Learning System Design can also improve your coding sense and coding skill to convert a real world requirement into code.
