How To Learn System Design In 2025 As Beginner | Highlights and Annotations by Gistr.

Prerequisites: A solid foundation in computer science fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, and object-oriented programming. Basic familiarity with networking concepts is also helpful. Learning Sequence: 1. Introduction to System Design: Begin by understanding the difference between low-level and high-level design, functional and non-functional requirements, and how to gather requirements for a problem statement. Key concepts like scalability, reliability, availability, and maintainability should be grasped, along with real-world application examples. 2. Distributed Systems Concepts: Learn about the CAP theorem, consistency models, and how to handle challenges like latency, failure, and concurrency in distributed systems. 3. Networking and Communication Protocols: Understand the differences between HTTP, WebSockets, gRPC, REST, and GraphQL. Learn about load balancing strategies, rate limiting, CDNs, and the benefits of edge computing. 4. Databases and Storage: Explore SQL and NoSQL databases (including MongoDB), sharding, replication, partitioning, and how to scale database clusters. Learn about query optimization, indexing, event sourcing, CQRS patterns, and various database types (e.g., time-series, columnar). Understand caching strategies (LRU, LFU, TTL), cache invalidation, and distributed caching. Learn performance optimization techniques and profiling tools (like the Google Chrome profiler). 5. Messaging and Event-Driven Architectures: Learn about message queues, event-driven architectures (EDA), publish-subscribe models, point-to-point messaging, message keys, and concepts like at-least-once and exactly-once processing. 6. Scaling and System Design Principles: Understand horizontal and vertical scaling, microservices architecture versus monolithic architecture, service discovery, orchestration tools, circuit breakers, failover strategies, and disaster recovery. 7. System Observability and Monitoring: Learn about logging, monitoring, alerting tools, tracing, telemetry, health checks, and implementing auto-healing. Understand SLOs and SLAs. 8. Security: Cover authentication (OAuth, JWT), data encryption (TLS), protection against DDoS attacks, rate limiting, and the zero-trust security model. Learn how to design secure APIs. 9. Implementing a System Design: Practice solving system design problems for various applications. This involves applying the concepts learned in the previous sections to create a complete system design. Practice Suggestions: Personal Projects: Work on personal projects to apply the concepts learned. Start with smaller projects and gradually increase complexity. Company Projects (if applicable): Contribute to system design discussions and implementations within your company. System Design Interview Preparation: Practice solving system design problems using the learned concepts. There are many resources available online, including websites and books, that provide practice problems and solutions. Utilize the provided playlist for additional practice. Real-world Use Cases: Explore real-world applications of the concepts learned to gain a deeper understanding of their practical implications. The provided playlist will assist with this.