Course Structure for Modern System Design

Structure of the course

This course consists of forty chapters. These chapters can be segmented into four different sections given below.

1. Introduction: The introduction section is composed of five chapters. The first chapter guides on how to prepare for the system design interview. The second chapter introduces the course and its key features. The third chapter talks about different types of abstractions. Next, we discuss some indispensable non-functional characteristics that every large-scale system should have. We wrap this chapter up with back-of-the-envelope calculations that enable us to estimate resources during our design problems.

2. Building blocks: The “Building Blocks” chapter starts with an introductory lesson presenting sixteen different building blocks. Each of these building blocks is explained in an independent chapter. We conclude this section with the "Conclusion" chapter, which also serves as an introduction to the next section.

3. Design problems: This section is the meat of the course and is carefully crafted from thirteen design problems.

4. Epilogue: The “Epilogue” section wraps up this course and is made up of three chapters. The first covers spectacular failures that show how, in the real world, even a small mistake can bring down a large and successful application. Such failures may be inevitable, but we highlight some measures to mitigate such failures. We conclude the course with the concluding remarks chapter.

Note: Although we did our best to keep the chapters independent, our readers will find it useful to read them in the given sequence.

Strengths of the course

While filling some important gaps in other available courses, we believe this course has some key strengths to offer. We summarize the strengths and the advantages this course has over others in the table given below.

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