Operating System Concepts

Great read. Anyone who wants to dive into the basics of kernel programming should read this book. There is a good set of practice problems, but personally I found the writing done well enough so that I did not need the extra practice. In addition, the writers have a sense of humor and make the reading fun, rather than a listing of computer facts like other books. Good book.

All students of computer science need a fairly clear idea about what operating systems are and what should be expected from them. As a computer scientist you cannot just sneer at Microsoft Windows and say that it is not a well-designed OS without knowing what actually DOES constitute a well-designed OS. That is what this book is about- What constitutes a well-designed and complete operating system and all of the choices and design decisions that must be made along the way. Because this book is about operating system design concepts, you will find some pseudocode but not source code. If you want source code, the authors have an alternative edition, "Operating Systems Concepts with Java", published in 2003, where they offer actual design examples in the Java programming language. Although this is one of the best books published on operating system design, the high level of the discussion may cause the computer science student to find himself/herself asking exactly what is it to design an operating system? Thus a good companion to this book is an older text entitled "Design of the UNIX Operating System" by Bach. That book shows the implementation of the concepts of this book in the design of the UNIX operating system and also offers actual code. The two texts are best read together. The first part of this book, the overview, may be especially confusing to a novice to the subject. The clarity of the book greatly improves in part two, process management. There all aspects of process management including threads, deadlock avoidance, and synchronization are described as well as how to accomplish them. This section of the book, as well as sections three and four on memory and storage management, are where "Design of the UNIX Operating System" will be most helpful in illustrating concepts. The rest of the sections of the book are on topics that are much more modern and thus it is hard to find good supplemental texts. The last section of the book offers actual case studies on Windows XP and Linux and contrasts the features of those operating systems with the theory of the book. Also, there are appendices that analyze the design concepts of three older operating systems (the FreeBSD System, The Mach System and Windows 2000 System) that are published electronically on the net. To get the most from this book you should have already had a course in computer architecture at the upper undergraduate level and have some knowledge of a programming language such as C or Java so that you can implement and experiment with the concepts mentioned in this book.

I personally think this is a great book for a broad overview of OS's. Dont think it will go into any great programming detail, but there are other books for that. This is just for broad details. Very good for that reason I think.

This book does a good job in keeping up with the Title, "OS Concepts". I won't go in detail justifying that, as it's already been done by several before me. However, one point worth mentioning is that it's still a concepts book. To be a real programmer / computer science person, one needs to implement the concepts. In that regard, I'd recommed the book " Operating Systems: Design & Implementation by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Albert S. Woodhull". That way you'll know what the code looks like. This book is great to start with and learn how an OS works. "NO CODE INSIDE THOUGH"

As the title says this book is about concepts on Operating Systems. From this point of view the book is written very carefully. At a first contact I felt it was too high level as said by another reviewer before. But the title says Concepts, actually. And concepts are explained very well, in a straightforward way. If you are concerned more with implementation issue, then you should look at Tanenbaum or the other book by Silberschatz that deals with implementation.