Customer Reviews

Operating System Concepts, Seventh Edition

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Definetely targeted towards the sophomore/Junior level students. This book goes into generic concepts used by most operating systems - i.e., what happens when a program is loaded into memory? How do processes make system calls to the kernel, how is deadlock among several programs competing for the same resources resolved, what is the characteristics of real-time operating systems etc.

I have adopted this book for teaching the operating systems course. I find that students, in general, appreciate this book as it is very readable. I believe a good text book should have the following qualities: It should be light enough to read it in bed, the fonts should be large enough to not give a headache after an hour of reading, should be written in clear lucid style with plenty of figures and should have decent binding. I believe this book qualifies in all those aspects.

However, I do have one unpleasant comment. I hate it when authors keep coming out with new editions with just small delta changes - forcing students to buy high priced editions because some professors could care less about the cost of books to students (after all, we profs get them for free). The 7th edition is not a whole lot different than the 6th edition (about 2 or 3 new chapters included in the 7th edition). Considering that you can buy a used 6th edition for half the price of a new 7th edition, I recommended my students to go with the 6th edition instead and chose to just teach them some of the additional materials from the 7th edition.

What I would have liked to see in this book - greater detail (perhaps with some psuedocode) on the workings of the kernel and how programs can take advantage of it (I guess I am thinking along the lines of Steven's UNIX programming book).

This new seventh edition of the book has been brought up to date to include recent developments in operating systems such as Windows XP and the new small footprint operating systems that work in hand held devices such as the Palm and in cell phones. In addition the text now corresponds to the suggestions from Computing Curricula 2001 for teaching operating systems.

Most of the book is on general purpose operating systems such as Linux and those from Microsoft. But at the end of the book there are chapters on other types of operating such as Real Time Operating Systems and MultiMedia OS's.

Finally there are some chapters which the authors call case studies. In these, one chapter goes into a detailed discussion of Linux, another chapter covers Windows XP. Chapter 23 covers several early operating systems that helped to define the features that make up modern os's. These include: Atlas, XDX-940, THE, RC 4000, CTSS, MULTICS, OS/360, and MACH, along with brief mentions of several others.

Note that this not a book on how to use operating systems, this is a book on how operating systems are designed. It is intended for upper level undergraduate students or first year graduate students.

From the 2nd paragraph of the preface, the authors:

"...wrote this book as a text for an introductory course in operating systems at the junior or senior undergraduate level or at the first-year graduate level.... It provides a clear description of the concepts that underlie operating systems. As prerequisites, we assume that the reader is familiar with basic data structures, computer organization, and a high-level language, such as C."

I'd say that's an excellent synopsis of this book. It's not a book on how to use or how to program operating systems. It's a book on the CONCEPTS underlying them. It's not as difficult to get through, but it's somewhat like Patterson's & Hennessy's "Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface" <ASIN:1558606041>. Where that book looks at how computers work from the point of view of electrons whizzing by on the silicon, this book looks at how they work from the point of view of the operating system. Personally, I'd put the target educational level at no lower than the senior undergraduate level just because it'd probably be very difficult for a junior to have the necessary prerequisites. But, regardless, it's a well-written book that covers the topic decently. I rate it at 4 stars out of 5.

As an aside, Florida State University (FSU) uses this book in their COP 4610 course: "Operating Systems & Concurrent Programming."

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.

While "Operating Systems" is not exactly the sexiest subject in Computer Science, it ought to be possible to make it interesting, for example by taking a historical or problem solving approach.

Sadly, Silverschatz does none of this; in fact, often his book reads more like a tome on tax-law. Take this sentence, for example:

"If no process is executing in its critical section and some processes wish to enter their critical sections, then only those processes that are not executing in their remainder sections can participate in the decision on which will enter its critical section next, and this selection cannot be postponed indefinitely." (p.194, 7th ed.)

Silberschatz also has a tendency to make sweeping statements without giving examples, like what I am doing here. Admittedly, online chapters for different operating systems are available, but I think more examples within the main text itself would have helped to explain the concepts better.

The book also contains errors. For example it says that, "For instance, suppose that the queue usually has just one outstanding request. Then, all scheduling algorithms behave the same, because they have only one choice for where to move the disk head: They all behave like FCFS scheduling." (p.461, 7th ed.) While this is true for shortest-seek-time-first, LOOK and C-LOOK algorithms, it is wrong for SCAN and C-SCAN. They would continue moving the HD head from cylinder 0 to cylinder max, with worse performance than SSTF.

Since I do not have wide experience with other O/S books, I will not give a categorically "don't buy it!" recommendation. After all, Silberschatz is quite comprehensive and could be okay as a reference book. However, if you require a book to teach you O/S concepts, I would strongly recommend looking elsewhere. Perhaps try a book by Tanenbaum? His prose is more readable.

This is an adequate text for an introductory operating systems course. It covers all the basics: process management, memory, file systems, IO, and communications. It even acknowledges the increasingly important embedded world, and offers case studies of Mach, BSD Unix, and Windows 2000 in on-line support.

That's actually a real strength of the book - its supporting web site. There are appendices, a term's worth of powerpoint slides, assignments, and more. It's very comforting, if you're an instructor without a given syllabus, to have that kind of backup.

The book bottoms out fast, though. It's very weak on processor hardware and how that affects OS design. For example, multithreaded processors, multicores, multiprocessors, and loosely coupled systems have fundamentally different kinds of synchronization issues, which are barely mentioned. Even something as fundamental as "memory mapped IO" gets little, if any mention. This shallowness pervades discussions of networking, file systems with striping and shadowing, and just about everything else. Security may be the weakest section here, except maybe reliability - I'm not sure that's mentioned at all.

But, no matter how fast you talk, there's only so much you can cram into a one-term intro OS course. This is about right, whether you follow the more or less aggressive of the suggested syllabi. One extra star for all the instructor support at the web site - if you need it, you'll appreciate it.

//wiredweird

We had to buy this book as part of our undergraduate Computer Engineering curriculum. The book is very well written; I taught myself a lot by studying it.

This book was so good that I actually ended up telling one of my friends in Computer Engineering at another school about it, only to find out that 1) they use it there, too, and that 2) he thinks just as highly of the text.

This was a required text for a college class. As a beginner in understanding how operating systems are created the first few chapters were easy to read and understand, but after that I needed the professor to be able to understand the concepts.

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 offers coverage of issues encountered in designing an operating system, but does this in a rather dry and uninteresting manner, using examples and diagrams which are somewhat contrived and confusing at times.

Its code snippets are often incorrect and shows no sign it has ever been checked for correctness. I am basing this assumption on the fact this is the 7th edition and blatant errors still exists. Errors range from syntax to logic errors, both in the explanations and code provided.

The book also does not explain certain algorithms, and merely prints them in pseudo code, then moves on with not insights into the how and why of it.

If you have no other choice, then this book will suffice as long as you take what it says with a grain of salt, and apply your own logic rather than take what the authors say as gospel.

Cheers,
Steve