The 6 Best distributed system design books (2023 reviews)

If you often find yourself scrambling for good book, alex xu distributed system design book should be your first option for buying. If you have a limited amount of time that you have to prepare system interview, this book is definitely the one that quickly brushes you up with the best pattern and common practices. It’s tailored towards junior and semi-senior engineers. Even for non-interview-preparation purpose, it’s a good fresher for some of the key concepts of building a large scale software system.

It’s a detailed step-by-step guide that is actionable and very easy to follow. It has tons of diagrams, tables and charts that help a lot. It helps not just refreshing the system architecture concepts but also provides a well defined structure to answer system design interview questions. If you want a 1000 foot view of system design, this will be a good starting place. It's really a must-read for system design interview preparation.

Why We Like This:

Great book to prepare for system design interview
Covers most areas in building scalable distributed systems
One of the new comers and featured product

Best For aspiring SA: Saurabh Shrivastava distributed system design Book

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This book comes highly recommended for architects. It dives deep on different architecture pillars for architecture optimization and talks about details on workload automation with DevOps. It is indeed a solution’s architect handbook. It is a very complete book, with several disciplines required for the role of the software architect. The book does a great job of explaining concepts, methodologies, and general principles across a variety of subjects.

This book allows a zoomed-out view to see the big picture through a set of intelligently curated chapters and sections. The book is structured very well and uses bullet points and numbering to break down challenging concepts. This book will benefit anyone who aspires to become a Solution Architect, an extremely important role in today’s IT organizations.

Why We Like This:

Excellent book for a foray into the world of a cloud solutions architect
Learning from mistakes, makes you wiser, productive and an efficient solution architect
Tier web applications, to building out large scale data ingestion and machine learning pipelines
Server-based solutions for problems typically handled by solutions architects

Best For those: Kelsey Hightower distributed system design Book

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We know from years of feedback from readers, customers and amazon sellers, what most people want in a convenient and appropriate book. The kelsey hightower distributed system design book is exactly that - it's a simple book that hits all the right notes. This is easily the best introduction to Kubernetes out there. It is great book for those getting started with kubernetes with a good set of practical examples. It has been truly remarkable to watch it transform from a curiosity largely used in experiments to a crucial production-grade infrastructure that powers large-scale production applications in varied fields, from machine learning to online services. It even teaches you how to install kubernetes on a raspberry pi cluster.

This book touches on all the high points and is a good book to quickly come up to speed on the core kubernetes resources and how they are used. It is great book to get familiarity with main kubernetes concepts from pods to complete deployments, including statefulsets and real examples. It is absolutely great, and it leaves a room for the reader to go and explore possible tunables.

Why We Like This:

Very well-written introductory text to kubernetes
Very well written and correct level of technical detail
Good brand reputation

Best For professionals: Stanley Chiang distributed system design Book

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If you often find yourself scrambling for appropriate and satisfactory book, stanley chiang distributed system design book should be your first option for buying. This approach is suitable both for people new to software design or SWE who are experienced in software design or SWE who are experienced in the industry. It provides is closely related to how the interview scoring is done using the rubric of these big tech companies. It's a true shortcut to coming off as competent, polished, and ready to land your dream job. This is a comprehensive guide to the system design interview at big tech companies.

The concepts chapter and interview questions are distilled from years of interviewing experience, and provides relevant and clear information. It is written in a coaching style and gives many examples of how to effectively scope use cases, tips on how to draw system diagrams, think about performance issues, etc. It also contains the newer material that big tech companies are using in interviews, such as spatial queries and large scale data processing. This is a very informative book and it contains three useful pieces.

Why We Like This:

Explains distributed designs in a way that is clear and easy to understand
An excellent text for learning system design
Excellent explanation of a ride-sharing system design with spatial queries and r-trees

Best For business: Heather Adkins distributed system design Book

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Heather Adkins makes beautiful and great book with classic and smartly choosen materials. The material is structured in a coherent manner, and the case studies presented at different points in the book have the benefit from being drawn from the diverse group of authors. It can be used for the reader's specific topics of interest, in any order.

Why We Like This:

Excellent case studies and learning material to use for team training
Must-read for anyone in the software industry
One of the new comers and featured product

Best For learning scalability: Ian Gorton distributed system design Book

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If you're looking to build a solid foundation on how to build these systems, this book is a great place to start. It is a great book to build your foundations. It is easy to read and covers a wide range of topics in the distributed system, but at the same time it knows exactly when to go deep on a subject like comparing different consensus algorithms.

This book does a really good job at explaining distributed systems in a way that is easy to follow.

Why We Like This:

A great aid when studying scalable systems and concurrent systems
Good investment for long term

The 6 Best distributed system design books (2023 reviews)

Our Top Picks:

Best Overall: Alex Xu distributed system design Book

Best For aspiring SA: Saurabh Shrivastava distributed system design Book

Best For those: Kelsey Hightower distributed system design Book

Best For professionals: Stanley Chiang distributed system design Book

Best For business: Heather Adkins distributed system design Book

Best For learning scalability: Ian Gorton distributed system design Book

10 Best distributed system design books