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10 Best System Design Courses for Coding Interviews in 2021

These are the best online courses to learn System Design from Udemy, edX, and Educative for coding interviews in 2021

Hello guys, if you are preparing for Coding interviews and looking for the best System design courses then you have come to the right place. System design is one of the most difficult topics and many candidates fail to answer questions related to system design, scalability, load-balancing, and failover, which are key to pass the interview.

I have been sharing useful courses for coding interviews for quite some time like earlier, I have shared best algorithms courses, SQL courses, Dynamic Programming, and Linux courses for programmers, and today, I am going to talk about the best online courses to master System design for interviews.

These system design courses have been chosen from popular online learning platforms and websites like Udemy, Coursera, edX, and Educative and these are created by experts who have seen the interviews from both sides of the table.

Along the way, I have also shared useful System Design Youtube videos where you can learn about some popular system design questions like Parking Lot and designing a Messenger service like Whatsapp or WeChat for FREE.

System design interviews are very common in tech giants and FAANG companies like Facebook, Amazon, Apple, NetFlix, and Google. They are different from coding interviews or data structure and algorithm interviews but can be harder.

These online courses will help you to learn useful skills to crack system design interviews at tech companies like Google, Uber, and other FAANG companies.

10 Best System Design Courses for Programmers and Developers in 2021

Without wasting any more of your time, here is my list of some of the great, interactive, and fun online courses to learn Software design and Architecture. These are truly the best online courses you can join to learn this essential skill or improve your system design skill.

1. Grokking the System Design Interview

This is one of my favorite courses when it comes to learning Software Design or System design. It's created to prepare you for the System design interview, but you can also use it to learn how to approach System design in general.

The Grokking the System Design Interview, is one of the first courses (or book) that describes the Large Scale Distributed System Design problems in detail. Even if you've worked on Distributed Systems before, there are a lot of things that you can learn from this course.

Authors have created this course to provide you design choices(including pros and cons) so that you can understand the requirement, compare approaches, and come up with the best solution for the problem at hand.

They are also mindful not to provide a solution at a granularity that's appropriate for a 45-minute discussion. This makes the course very interesting

Here is the link to join this course — Grokking the System Design Interview

Even if you are not preparing for Coding interviews, I suggest you take this course to improve your System design skills.

2. Preparing for the System Design Interviews

This is another great course to prepare for System Design Interviews. Created by Rajat Mehta, this Udemy course will teach you what and how to prepare for these interviews using real-world case studies.

You will get a good overview of key topics as well as how to approach a system design interview. The course covers real-life case studies from frequently asked system design questions.

Here are some of the sample questions you will learn in this system design course-

How to design an Uber-like App (Sample Question)
How to create an eCommerce app and scale it to millions of users
How to create a website to sell movie tickets online? Scale it to millions of users.
How would you go about creating feed postings in a social network?

Overall a good course for anyone who wants to prepare for a system design interview. Talking about social proof, more than 3K students have joined this course.

Here is the link to join this course — Preparing for the System Design Interviews

3. Web Application & Software Architecture 101

This is another excellent course from Educative to learn about Web application architecture. In this course, you will learn about different architectural styles like monolith, microservices, client-server, 3-tier architecture, decentralized peer-to-peer architecture, and how request and data move in web application.

You will also learn about how to think big and think in terms of layers, performance, scalability, and high availability, which is a must for today's application.

The course not only introduces with the different architectural pattern but also explains the pros and cons of each approach and walk you through a different scenario where a particular architecture is more suitable than others.

Here is the link to join this architecture course — Web Application & Software Architecture 101

To be honest with you, this is the best design and architecture course for not only senior developers but also every software developer out there as it will expand your thinking process and will you make a more confident web developer.

There is a significant discount on the course now, and it's available for just $53, the original price $79, it's a bit expensive them Udemy courses but worth it.

On the other hand, if you like Educative as a platform, you can also buy a subscription for just $17 per month ( 50% discount ), I have one, and I highly recommend you to get.

4. Software Design and Architecture Specialization Coursera

This is another, well-structured course to learn Software design and Architecture from Coursera, a great online portal. It is offered by the University of Alberta and delivered by Kenny Wong.

The specialization contains five online courses to teach you object-oriented design, design patterns, software architecture, and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

The specialization also includes a project, and you will be awarded a certificate after completing the course. The best part of this specialization is that you will learn the science behind Software design and architecture.

Once you know the relevant patterns and principles, it would be much easier to communicate your plan with your fellow programmers and stakeholders. You will also gain the ability to critically view a software or piece of code from the design perspective.

Here is the link to join this software design course — Software Design and Architecture Specialization

5. Data Structures and Software Design by edX

This is another great course to learn System design and Software design. This course is part of the CS Essentials for Software Development Professional Certificate program.

This course will take your skills to the next level by teaching you how to write "good" software that appropriately represents and organizes data, is easy to maintain, and is of high quality.

You will not only learn how to convert a set of requirements into a high-quality software design but also how to write efficient code that is easy to read, understand, and modify.

This is a great free course to learn two essential skills data structures and software design. The class is 4-weeks long and requires 8–10 hours of effort weekly. The course also offers a certificate, but you need to pay for it.

Here is the link to join this design course — Data Structures and Software Design

6. Secure Software Design Specialization

This is a great Coursera certification and course to learn about Secure Design. Security is an essential concern of Modern software design, and this specialization is focused on teaching you how to design secure software.

There are four courses in this Coursera Specialization which will not only show you practices of safe software design but also introduce you to tools and security threads and how to mitigate them.

Like other Coursera specializations, all four courses are free-to-audit, but you need to pay a small fee if you need a certificate of completion, something which you can add to your CV or LinkedIn profile.

This certificate gives you the right to show the world that you know about secure software design. The University of Colorado offers the course.

Here is the link to join this course — Secure Software Design Specialization

By the way, If you are planning to join multiple Coursera courses or specialization then consider taking a Coursera Plus subscription which provides you unlimited access to their most popular courses, specialization, professional certificate, and guided projects.

It cost around $399/year but it's completely worthy of your money as you get unlimited certificates.

7. System Design: Messenger service like Whatsapp or WeChat — Interview Question

This is another Youtube video where you can learn to solve another popular System design interview question about designing Whatsapp or WeChat like messaging application.

This is a system design interview question asked at companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and many startups: How to design a messenger service like Whatsapp, WeChat, or Facebook Messenger?

The instructor will guide you through this interview question, give you talking points, and point out the right questions to ask. A quick and easy explanation even if this is your first system design interview question.

Here is the Youtube video you can watch to solve this system design problem:

8. Java Programming: Principles of Software Design

This is an excellent course for Java programer to learn the principles of Software design. In this course, you will learn how to solve real-world problems with Java using multiple classes.

You will also create programming solutions that scale using Java interfaces. Recognize that software engineering is more than writing code — it also involves logical thinking and design.

As part of the course, you will also enter a program analyzes and sorts of earthquake data and developed a predictive text generator if you are a Java programmer, then I highly recommend this course for you.

It's also part of the Java Programming and Software Engineering Fundamentals Specialization, which has helped many programmers to strat their Java career.

Here is the link to join this Java design course — Java Programming: Principles of Software Design

9. Master Object-Oriented Design in Java — Homework + Solutions

One of the problems with Java developers is that they know how to code, but mostly they are not aware of how to write useful industry-standard object-oriented software. This course tries to fill that gap.

In this course, you will not only learn about object-oriented programming and design using abstract classes and interface but also about OOP design principles like SOLID and outline patterns and design patterns like Builder, Observer, and Decorator, which are vital for writing modular and flexible code.

The course also has assignments where you can apply the knowledge to design software from scratch, which is great to master this valuable skill truly.

The course has been created by Imtiaz Ahmad, one of the Udemy best seller instructors, and more than 19,363 students have already enrolled in this course.

Here is the link to join this course — Master Object-Oriented Design in Java

10. Parking Lot — System Design Interview Question

This is a nice Youtube video explaining how to solve a popular parking lot System design interview question.

This video tutorial covers the following use cases

Give a user ticket when he enters
2. Generate price when the user exits.

They also discuss APIs, Database model,s and database choice, how to make it distributed, and concurrency which is key system design concepts and often asked during coding interviews.

Here is the full video you can watch to learn how to solve this popular system design interview question.

11. Fundamentals of High-Level System Design

This is another udemy course to learn about High-level system design. This course is not just useful for coding interviews but also for your day to day work.

The course provides an introduction to the fundamentals of High-Level System Design. Whether you are an undergrad who wants to learn more about a distributed system or an aspirant to crack the system design interview in one of the top tech companies, you will benefit from this course!

Here are the key things you will learn in this course:

What consideration you make while designing a large scale system
The building blocks of large scale software systems
Managing tradeoffs while designing large scale applications

Overall a great course to learn about high-level system design and some useful concepts like Scalability, High Availability, Reliability, and Performance.

here is the link to join this course — Fundamentals of High-Level System Design

12. Cracking the System Design Interview

This is another awesome online course to learn System Design fundamentals like scaling, databases, caching, shredding, and much more. The instructor claims that this is the only course you need to crack system design interviews

Here are the key skills you will learn in this course:

Learn what load balancers are and how to implement them within your system.
Acquire knowledge about Relational and Non-relational databases. Different kinds of NoSQL databases will be covered in detail.
Learn about various distributed data architectures like GFS, Hadoop, and Spark.
Learn how to improve your system's performance using sharding. We will also cover various strategies to shard databases.
Understand different uses of message queues and Kafka.
Develop a deeper understanding of caches. Learn about cache eviction and data access policies. Redis and Memcached are also discussed

You can see a lot of useful topics are covered which is generally not covered in typical system design interview courses. I suggest watch previews of this course and if you find it interesting and connect with the instructor then this could be a great resource to build your system design skills.

Here is the link to join this course — Cracking the System Design Interview

13. Grokking the Advanced System Design Interview [Educative]

This is an advanced course to learn about Software architecture and System Design from Educative, one of my favorite interactive learning platforms, and this course is like the advanced version of their popular Grokking The System Design course.

Designing systems and architecting software is one of the key responsibilities of a senior software engineer. But it's difficult to master without practice, and few people have the chance to work on large-scale projects from the ground up.

This advanced System design course solves that problem. It provides you a chance to dive deep into the most common types of distributed systems including key-value store, distributed messaging and streaming system, distributed file storage systems, and more.

By using actual use-cases from some of the most famous systems, you will get a look at the architecture the creators had in mind while designing the system. You will then evaluate various tradeoffs that the original developers had to consider and what prompted them to choose a certain design given their constraints.

Along the way, you will also learn about a set of design patterns that are used to solve some of the most common problems in distributed systems. These are especially handy in system design interviews.

If you have an interview coming up, or you're interested in software design/architecture, then you can use this course to level up your system design skills and prepare better.

Here is the link to join this course — Grokking the Advanced System Design Interview

And, if you find the Educative platform and their Grokking courses like Grokking the System Design Interview, and this one then consider getting an Educative Subscription which provides access to their 250+ courses for just $14.9 per month. It's very cost-effective and great for preparing for coding interviews.