Customer Reviews

INSIDE Microsoft Windows 2000 On Video

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

When I first heard that Russinovich was teaming with Solomon to do the 3rd edition of this book, I knew the potential of what this book could be. Now that I have it, I can firmly say that it surpasses every one of my expectations.

Solomon and Russinovich do a great job covering all grounds well. Topics range from the extremely low level of boot process, device drivers, exceptions, and page tables to the high level structures of the object manager, file systems, and cache management.

Odd topics such as networking and security complete the discussion. This book is an excellent complement to Richter's Programming Applications book, with very little overlapping content. It is so complete, in fact, that it could almost be used as a blueprint to clone Windows, if one so desired.

This book is very light on code and very heavy on diagrams and tables. It is so clearly written that turning the information into usable code should be a breeze.

If I had to complain, there is a lack of native application discussion. But this is pushing it, as the sysinternals web site is included on CD and includes this material.

As a former systems programmer on Burroughs (Unisys) systems, I was always used to knowing how the OS did things. It is a real treat after working on PCs for so long, to finally get a book that makes it interesting to learn the internals again. This book is full of things that will give you an appreciation of any OS, but the way it cracks into the guts of 2000 is great. The experiments in this book make it really easy to learn how 2000 is organized and apply it to existing programming projects. Learning 2000 from the inside via the debugger is just a great way to do it. No offense to David, but Mark's influence is obvious. If you are a fan of his Internals column, you will like this book even better. The fact that he does it without source code is even more amazing. Wait a minute...why hasn't Microsoft paid these guys whatever they want to build the next version of 2000?
If you appreciate a good OS and an even better manual on it...Buy This Book...

This is the book to take with you if you are expelled to deserted island with 1 laptop, solar power generator, win32 sdk/ddk, and 1 book of choice. It will make you think, wonder, appreciate and grok the best OS that Microsoft can offer. As Matt Pietrek said once, the magic of being debugger guru is the better understanding of OS. If there is any book to help you become one, this is it.

What is very important also is that along the line Mark (and David) explain and teach the reverse engineering techniques to explore the surrounding world of unknown black-box software. The books if full of ideas, hints and tips on multiple ways how to peek under the hood and extract that piece of information you are looking for.

It made me to fully understand and re-think the implications of thread scheduling, memory management, paging and synchronization on the complex code I was working with and resulted in great performance improvements.

You will also get to see the elegance of design decisions and compromises made by engineers working on such a complex OS, and this enlightening experience alone justifies reading of the book even if you are not interested in Win32 in any way.

It is incredible amount of knowledge and hard work compressed in a single volume.

I bought this book to supplement my knowledge on OS implementations and more immediate to understand better programming technicues found in Jeffrey Richter book. The book covers wide variaty of issues from logon to cache manager. Some chapters written excellent like thread scheduling and interrupt handling, while others are barely readable. Memory management chapter is far from being clear, so is cache manager. The security chapter could contain more material. Another issue is chapter order, I believe memory management chapter should be sooner. Chapters are too tight connected, sometimes you need to read chapters in parallel to understand. But, if you already familiar with windows programming on advanced level this book is good purchase.

This book is interesting for people who want to learn about what goes on under the hood of Windows 2000. The authors' style is clear and easy to understand and there is a good wealth of precious, in depth information.
It would have been even better if more details were included: some system mechanisms are mentioned, but the details are left out (particularly on LPCs). Also, the book is not oriented toward experimenting with the system by means of writing kernel mode code: nearly all of the experiments are based on the usage of tools. I think the book could have had room for something more if a number of pages of data structures listing (returned by Kd commands) were left out, particularly since these listings have very few comments and therefore add very little to what everyone can get from the debugger.

This book explains windows 2000 internal workings in reasonable breadth and sufficient depth. This book is MUCH better than the 2nd Edition of Inside Windows NT, perhaps because of Mark's contributions.
The only problem with this book is that, inspite of being huge, it is only one volume. I think Windows 2000 is too extensive to fit in one book, and though the book is great for getting at many of the principles, you need to look at the DDK/SDK documentation to get more details, and actually use them in your work. At this level the book provides a great starting point to delve into OS internals, but perhaps someone needs to write a book for each chapter to do justice.

This book has it all. The most comprehensive overview of Windows you will find anywhere

I got this book 6 days ago, and I've read chapter 1 - 7 so far, the way these two gods explain and show how the internal win 2000 system works is just impressive. If you have read Inside Windows NT 2nd edition by Daveid A Solomon, you know what you are up for, David teamed up with a crazy russian Mark Russinovich which has practically made Windows NT (2000) Magazine worth reading. ;)

The only thing I'd love to see in the future is a little more coverage of the terminal services part of it. (2 pages isn't enough), and maybe a little more deep hands on experiments. All handson experiements seems to be pretty much "overview and simple". But you can't have it all, this nearly 1000 page book is like a design document for NT/2000. >=]

But no doubt, if you develop NT tools or sysadmin NT network this book is a *MUST*! If you don't have it, HURRY UP AND BUY IT NOW!

Also, remember to visit http://www.sysinternals.com for the best utils for NT. (And maybe the most stable ones. ;))

Terje

This book is filled with more info than I could've hoped for (aside from source code examples). In addition, the correlation between Win32 APIs and OS implementation is quite helpful.

Highly recommended for anyone that needs to gain an understanding of how the OS they are using / developing for works.

That's a great book for students that wants to learn how work modern operating systems.