I think one of the most helpful classes at MIT for learning the basics of software design is 6.033. Class schedule and readings here: http://web.mit.edu/6.033/w

I think one of the most helpful classes at MIT for learning the basics of software design is 6.033. Class schedule and readings here: http://web.mit.edu/6.033/www/schedule.shtml http://web.mit.edu/6.033/www/schedule.shtml In particular, the papers covered topics of software design from failures (like Therac-25) to examples of successfully designed large scale systems (like Map Reduce). I'd highly recommend reading through the papers, most of which can be found via Google search.