Customer Reviews

Operating System Concepts, 6th Edition

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This popular book was written as an introductory course to operating systems but systematically provides an extensive description of operating system concepts. The 1st half of the book is typically used for undergraduate computer science classes although the book as a whole is often required for graduate level classes.

It is assumed that readers will have some knowledge of high-level languages and general computer organization. The book does not spotlight any one particular operating system but rather presents concepts and algorithms that are common to many of the Oss that are commonly used today, including MS-DOS, Windows 2000 & NT, Linux, Sun Microsystems' Solaris 2, IBM OS/2, Apple Macintosh, and DEC VMS.

The book has 7 major parts:
1) Overview: What Operating Systems are, what they do, how they are designed, and where they came from. General history and explanations. Some discussion on hardware.

2) Process Management: How information is processed. Methods for process scheduling, interprocess communication, process synchronization, deadlock handling, and threads.

3) Storage Management: How main memory functions and executes. The mechanisms for storage of and access to data is covered. The classic internal algorithms and structures of storage management is discussed and the advantages and disadvantages of each.

4) I/0 Systems: The types of devices that attach to a computer. How the devices are accessed and controlled. Performance issues and examined thoroughly.

5) Distributed systems: The collection of processors that do not share a clock or memory. How distributed file systems are shared, synchronized, communicate, and deal with deadlocks.

6) Protection and Security: How mechanisms ensure that only certain processes that have obtained proper authorization can use certain files, memory segments, CPU, etc.

7) Case Studies: This is where individual real operating systems are discussed in depth. These systems are Linux, Windows 2000, FreeBSD, Mach, and Nachos.

Of course this is a very general list and omits many other aspects of Operating Systems that are included in the book. This 887 page book does not include formal proofs but it does contain (though it would be better to have more) figures, diagrams, examples, and notes to help explain concepts.

I've taken 2 operating systems courses at 2 different universities that used different editions of this book. In both classes, the biggest benefit came from the teachers and not the text. It encapsulates concepts from every major operating system in use today, but it's too general to do anything with. You can't use this book to help you write code because everything is at such a high level. It is good as a reference point to understand operating systems concepts...hence the title :) The process and memory coverage is great, although the process synchronization chapter didn't help my understanding much. If you're interested in learning the ideas behind the nuts and bolts of operating systems (what is a process? what is a thread? what is virtual memory? how do these things work in a general sense and on different systems?), read this book. If you want to implement those nuts and bolts (how would I implement this in my OS environment?), this book by itself won't help you much.

I gave the book 3 stars because the book can confuse you if you let it. My first profesor presented the material in a very confusing way. My next profesor did a better job but it still wasnt great. If you take it for what it is, a coverage of general concepts only, it makes the reading a lot easier. That's my conclusion :)

I used this book to teach an OS course to computer engineers at a 4-yr university. The course worked out well and the students liked the book. I made the mistake of using Tanenbaum's book as a reference, and got burned _twice_ by blatent errors in his book. The only problem with this book is that it covers some really esoteric subjects (i.e. theoretical deadlock detection algorithms) that never get any practical use.

In summary,
* Tanenbaum: wanders a lot, many errors
* Stallings: too dry for most people
* Silberschatz: the best of the bunch !!

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"

At nearly 900 pages you do get value for money.

Silberschatz and Galvin have written a hefty textbook which takes both concentration and time to work through. It cannot be read without some basic knowledge of computer systems architecture and is not a 'progressive' book i.e. chapters can be read individually to gain understanding of specialised aspects of OS. Major plus points go to the authors for the detailed explanations of real operating systems in common use. For those wanting general knowledge, try another OS book, maybe Englander's?

I selected this book for teaching the Operating Systems course to my undergrad class. The reason was simple, it was the only latest book available on the OS concepts.

But after going through the first 9 chapters, which are on intro to OS, process managment and memory management, the response I got from my students was that this book is very difficult to understand and I couldn't agree more.

I wouldn't say that all the chapters are like that but yes, there are few chapters in the process management section which I had to teach them from outside resources, the only help I took from the book is the topics that were covered. Infact when I first took this course, I had a difficult time understanding these chapters myself from the book, so I couldn't expect the students to do so.

One example is chapter 6, process synchronization, where they mention deadlock at many places, whereas the deadlock topic is discussed in the later chapter (chapter 7).

Good for experienced but don't expect the students to go through this book without additional resources.

By the way, can anyone explain the idea behind the dinasours on the cover?

If you have no experience with operating systems concepts this book can either be a decent friend or a nightmare, depending on which chapters you read.

On top of vagueness and ambiguity, the illustrations are poorly placed, sometimes pages after the accompanying text. Many chapters are confusing to the point of frustration, especially those concerning synchronization and paging. Some algorithms are oversimplified, while others are given in so much detail the basic concept is lost.

The book does however have its good points, hence my rating of 3. It's not so horrible that you can't learn from it. Some chapters are represented quite well. At the end of each chapter, the basis of that chapter's implementation in modern operating systems is given (Windows NT, Unix, Solaris etc.).

All in all, the book is faithful to its title but not worth the price. A good second choice if the book you want is out of stock.

I think this book is one of the most helpful I've read for developing my software engineering skills. I originally had the 5th edition as an undergraduate. We didn't have to read the whole book, and, quite frankly, at the time, I wouldn't have probably read it even if we did. But, once I started working, I started reading the book (for personal edification?), and was about halfway through when I saw that the sixth edition was out. I ordered it, gave away my fifth edition, and started over at the beginning so that I wouldn't miss any of the updates. I think that when it comes to learning threading it's an excellent reference. But beyond that, there are a lot of operating system concepts (virtual memory, security, clustering, and I could go on) that have plenty of applications in non-OS development projects. It's true that this book doesn't provide code examples, but the concepts are well described and it would be difficult to provide meaningful, concise code to illustrate most of the concepts. I think a good developer can take these concepts and use them to solve a variety of problems. I very much recommend this book, it's clearly written and very informative.

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.

This was the text for an introductory course on operating systems that I took last semester, and I found it one of the better textbooks on any topic in the field. It's well-written and enjoyable to read, and it avoids using unnecessary jargon (and explains any of it that *is* necessary). The earlier chapters touch on topics that are explored later on in more depth. I think this is what led a reviewer below to complain of repetition, but for me it was a positive feature. I also liked the order in which the topics were covered, and the chapters covering actual operating systems (Unix, Linux, Win NT) and tying them into the theoretical material were excellent.