Top Books on System Design

System Design Interview, Vol. 1, 2nd Ed. - Alex Xu - 2020 - The most practical intro to system design with clear frameworks and real examples.
System Design Interview, Vol. 2 - Alex Xu & Sahn Lam - 2022 - Deeper dives: Google Maps, ad click aggregation, stock exchange, and distributed message queues.
The System Design Primer - Donne Martin - 2024 - Free, comprehensive GitHub guide covering scalability, reliability, and trade-off thinking.
Designing Data-Intensive Applications - Martin Kleppmann - 2017 - Foundation for system design: storage, streams, consistency, and real-world trade-offs.
Building Microservices, 2nd Ed. - Sam Newman - 2021 - Microservice design, integration, and deployment for scalable systems.

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