System Design Pre-requisites

Level 1

• Basic Algorithms (searching, sorting, recursion, time/space complexity)
• Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) concepts
• Fundamentals of Operating Systems (processes vs threads, concurrency basics, memory management, deadlocks)
• Basic Data Structures
• At least one OOP language comfortably (Java, Python, C++, Go, etc.)

Level 1 Materials

Level 2

• Basic Computer Networking (TCP vs UDP, 3-way handshake, IP, ports, load balancers)
• How the web works (DNS, HTTP/HTTPS, browsers, request-response cycle)
• Basic SQL (queries, joins, indexing, normalization)
• REST API basics (verbs, status codes, idempotency, statelessness)

Level 2 Materials

Level 3

• Databases basics (ACID, replication, sharding, partitioning)
• Caching fundamentals (where, why, eviction policies, cache invalidation)
• Scalability concepts (vertical vs horizontal scaling)
• Message queues / pub-sub basics
• CAP theorem (high-level understanding) & Consistency vs Availability trade-offs
• Microservices vs Monolith (pros/cons at high level)

Level 3 Materials

Level 4

• Basic NoSQL concepts (key-value, document, column-family, graph)
• CDN (Content Delivery Network) purpose
• Basic authentication/authorization (sessions, JWT, OAuth basics)
• Rate limiting & throttling
• Logging, monitoring, alerting basics
• Distributed systems challenges (latency, fault tolerance, eventual consistency)

Level 4 Materials