Review - Is Grokking the System Design interview Course on DesignGuru Worth it?

Hello guys,  we are here again today for another exciting topic to discuss. But today, we will not discuss something related to Java or any other language or spring boot. Today, we will discuss something that is immensely practical and has the potential to land you very high-paying jobs. 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. I have shared the best System design courses for coding interviews and books in the past. Today, I will review one of the top system design courses for technical discussions, Grokking the System Design Interview by Design Gurus.
I am updating this post because Grokking the System Design course is now not available on Educative and it's now exclusively available on DesignGuru.io. 

Creator of this course and Founder of DesignGuru.io, Arslan Ahmed have also moved all of their Grokking courses like Grokking the Coding Interview Patterns, Grokking the OOP Design Interview, Grokking the Advanced System Design Interview, and Grokking the Dynamic Interview to DesignGuru.io, though you don't need to join these courses individually anymore, you can get them all by joining DesignGuru's all course bundle and also save money as this bundle is heavily discounted.. 

So what's the wait? Let's start!

If you've recently interviewed at a large tech company like Google, Microsoft or Amazon then you've almost certainly gone through the most popular System design course on internet, "Grokking the System Design Interview." 

This was also the first system design course I found when I was learning about Distributed system and preparing for Software 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.

At that time it was available on Educative.io, another great website for coding interviews and learning any programming technology and in reality, this course was essential in popularizing DesignGuru.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 has another System design class called Grokking the Advanced System Design, which just takes the system design interview preparation to the next level.

Both of these courses are not just useful for folks who are preparing for technical interviews but also for any experienced developer who want to learn more about Software design, challenges, trade offs and want to improve his skill of Software architecture.

Also here is a nice System design template from DesignGuru.io to learn about all the essential System design concepts and topics you should prepare for interviews. 

I liked it so much that I have printed and stick to my desk so that I can revise those concepts every now and then. You can do the same too. 

Grokking the System Design Course - Structure and Content

As I said this is one of the best System Design courses in the market. It is a text-based and interactive course which means you will not just sit and watch video but you will read and learn by doing. 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.

At Facebook's(or any other FAANG to be considered) 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 MacDowell'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, most programmers 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.

The course follows a pre-determined 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.

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. 

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 not motivated or convinced to purchase 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 and if you have time to do all the research you may find many free YouTube tutorial on System Design, covering same topics but you won't find any other resource which is structured, well written and provide just the right kind of depth you need for interviews. 

Also, the actual value of the course is the compilation of the most often asked interview questions, as well as the mental process to use while answering them. 

Another plus point of this course is that its written for all kind of programmers, so not just experienced programmers but also beginners and intermediate developer can join this system design course and learn a lot about how to go after solving a problem and designing a software around it. 

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 

Important points to note about the course

One of the best things about this course is that this is created from previous hiring managers from FAANG (Arslan Ahmed has worked in both Facebook and Microsoft) and other top-tier MNCs which means you will be learning from experts who have not only gone through the arduous process of solving system design problem to get into companies like Google and Amazon but also interviewed many candidates for them. . 

This means all the advise and approaches you will learn from 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 course is also not just comprehensive and cover real world system design case studies but also content is regularly updated, which means you will also be learning about solving the problem with best possible stack and tools available.  This is different then many System design courses on Udemy which are not update as often. 

Is Grokking The System Design Interview worth it?

The short answer of this question is Yes, Grokking the System Design interview course is totally worth it because it gives you opportunity to learn from previous hiring managers of FAANG companies and it covers most popular System design question. 

What makes it even more worthy is that it not just give solution but also explain the design choices you make like SQL vs NoSQL, server side vs client-side rate limiting and their pros and cons. Not many courses does that. 

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, experienced Java developers who want to become software architects can join this course to improve their knowledge of software design and system design.  They can read the case studies and understand about tradeoffs, estimation and problem solving at large scale. 

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 Interview Course?

By the way it comes to joining this course, you have two options, you can either buy this course directly or you can take an all course bundle which provides access to all of their Grokking courses for a big discount.  

By the way, DesignGuru.io has many other Grokking courses to prepare for essential coding interview topics like OOP Design, System Design, Dynamic Programming etc and you can get access to all of their courses for a big discount by joining their All course bundle for just $352. 

You can also use code GURU to get 30% discount and here is full list of courses which are included in their all course bundle:

That's all in this review of Grokking the System Design Interview course by DesignGuru.io. There is no doubt that this is one of the best System design course out there and thousands of people have already benefited from it.  

If you are serious about cracking your System design interview then you should join this course. It's also a great resource for experienced developers who want to learn more about System design and software architecture. 

Hope you guys now have clarity on what to do next and if you guys need this course or not. 

So, happy Software 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 on DesignGuru.io, 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.