Customer Reviews

Operating Systems: Design and Implementation (Second Edition)

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

 

 

First off, don't be fooled by people who claim this to be an "easy read". It isn't ... reading the entire book will take weeks, as the text is packed with information, not to mention exercises following each section. That being said, I highly recommend the book. It provides a thorough introduction to operating systems basics, from scheduling to terminals, along with source code. Don't expect to absorb it all at once!

This book is written by Tanenbaum, the main guy behind Minix, which is what Linux was based on. It provides good overviews for basic OS concepts like memory management, file systems, processes, etc. The concepts in this book book are intimately tied to examples of the Minix OS, which is a good thing.

To those who would rather see examples from Linux: Minix is a compact and modular OS, which is why it's a good choice for examples. The book contains the entire source code at the back for easy reference. Yes, the OS is that small. That's a good thing when you're trying to figure out how virtual memory works or what have you. You'd be lost trying to learn this stuff from Linux. Above everything else, the code is ***well-commented*** compared to Linux, a major plus. You won't find any "/* major hack */" comments, either. ;) Minix leaves out all the crap that Microsoft and Linux throw into the kernel that make it unstable in the first place. Learn about the bells and whistles later when you can do the basics.

I encountered two instances where the book wasn't updated to reflect changes in the OS, which were annoying to deal with. Also, I found a spelling or punctuation error about every ten pages, which was annoying for such a pricey book. Overall, however, the book is extremely usable and understandable. It's easy to pick up concepts from this text.

This was the text for an OS course that I took for my Masters. We had to implement 11 significant OS features for Minix (e.g. floppy disk cache, VGA driver, interprocess communication server,...) -- bugs were unacceptable (i.e. fail), as OSs must work. This class was 4 times more work that an other class I took for my Masters but I learned so much. I was already a very experienced Unix programmer when I took this, so I found it facinating to finally see what was under the hood (Minix/Unix is surprisingly small an compact -- very elegant). Tanenbaum is a real authority on the subject of operating systems and has a very engaging style. Probably the best computer science text book that I have read (I read this cover to cover, not just scanning but really reading). There is room for improvement though: the format could benefit from being updated, I had to use a lot of high-lighter. Clearer separation and indexing of key theories and sections would help. The OS basics are still relevant today (and could perhaps benefit from some expansion/clarification). I believe Tanenbaum has brought out new books since that go into some more contemporary / more advance areas.

The operating system for this book, Minix, is the ancestor to the now wildly popular linux. The idea behind this book is incredible, step through some of the most important areas of Operating Systems using an open source OS which was intentionally kept very simple.

Rather than a survey of all the capabilities of operating systems which we see in many other books, this book focuses in on five of the core concepts. It discusses design tradeoffs involved in selecting an implementation for any one area of an operating system and is a very respectable book from the man who wrote the Operating System in question. A Good book if you are interested in the deeper concepts of OS.

Although this book covers a great deal of topics regarding operating system designing, it is largely a book about the Unix OS, and its derivatives, particularly Minix. This is not at all bad, since it does cover a lot of general topics, but for a person interested in MS-DOS/Windows (or any other non-Unix OS for that matter), it can get boring.

The most important point to make about this book is: If you don't plan on messing around with the Minix source, you are probably wasting your money. This book may be 900+ pages, but the back 400 pages are a (reduced) listing of the Minix source code, and a lot of the main text is special sections that walk through this source code, describing how it works. This means that, in the end, you have about 250 pages of actual operating system text.

This is definitely a well written book, and the coverage of the trade-offs that an OS designer must make are very insightful, but if you don't plan on hacking Minix, you should probably look elsewhere.

I'm only studying computer sciences for 1 year, so I'm still a beginner, and this book was easy for me to read. It faces you with much of the tasks an OS has. It explains everything in detail. Example: It explains step by step, what's going on with a character you typed, untill it's on your screen. Maybe, you thought it was simple. Well, it isn't, but the book explains it very easy, so you can easily understand it with a bit of brains. PS. You don't have to know your English very well, because I understood the book, and normally I never speak English, because I speak Flemisch.

Outstanding book. See All synonyms for "Great". MINIX makes this book unique learning experience. Let us not forget MINIX was the source of inspiration for LINUX and many porions of MINIX can be found in LINUX.

I used this book in an OS course when the assigned text proved too annoying. It has very concise and well-written sections which are general to all OSes. I actually skipped most of the Minux-specific sections, and never got around to installing the OS (life is short!). So perhaps my experience isn't typical. But the book can certainly be used to get a nice and terse overview of OS concepts.

This is a good book to begin with on the subject of operating systems. I always wanted to look at an operating systems source code upclose, with a good explanation of whats going on, and this book has around 30,000 lines of it with comments. I hope the authors will come out with another book on the the init process and a few other services. I had a couple of laughs reading the book.

First there was Unix, then Minix , now Linux. Before Unix became a proprietary OS, its source code was available freely, hence the codes were used by many OS courses in colleges. Then things changed and the source code is no longer free. OS books will only present theories but not enough source code to show the implementation. This book is different. The authors took an extra initiative to create Minix which implements many features of Unix (and Linux) and include it into this book. I believe that this is a very good book to study OS in depth. It is reasonable that some mind stretching is needed as the subject of OS is sophisticated and complex. Highly recommended especially for Linux and Unix devotees.