Customer Reviews

Operating Systems: Internals and Design Principles

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

 

 

This book on operating systems compares a few operating systems, and Windows NT is taken as model. It does not go too much in depth technically, so it is easy to read and understand. The topic of memory management, virtual memory, and scheduling is also covered in this book; topics not easily found elsewhere all in one book.

I have not seen the like of this book. It was used as the text for an operating system course I took last winter. It covers all you need to know about operating system concepts. The numerous examples included couldn't have been explained in any better way. The approach from the first page to the last page makes you to always want to read more. It was so written in an interesting manner that you can never read a chapter in half. The references are very informative and provide links to other sources of valuable information. The book includes a good comparison of certain concepts in Windows and Unix Operating systems. The questions at the end of each chapter were tough though, with little or no hints, but nonetheless I will greatly recommend it for anybody taking any class in operating systems.

This book explains all aspects of operating system design with examples from NT and Unix. You don't start coding you own OS after reading this, but you get a better understanding of the problems in OS design and you probably become a better programmer.

I read this text in an Operating Systems class at the University of Phoenix. I liked the "bad" examples which were faulted by another reviewer, just as much as I liked the "good" examples. The "bad" examples show different approaches to solving the same problem, while showing the difficulty one might encounter while attempting to solve the problem that way.

My conclusion: if you are interested in the "bottom line" or "right answer," this book contains a lot of extraneous information. If you are interested in the hows and whys of current practice, this book is probably for you.

I just finished grad school in Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I borrowed this book from my Professor and after reading it for a while I am now buying it to use as a reference on the job. I can state quite confidently that it is one of the best OS books I have read. I strongly recommend this book for university coursework, particularly at the undergraduate level.

I used it as a reference book of my OS course last semester. I read it more than the desired book of the porfessor. The reason is that the context is clear and detailed.

It's mainly about the OS concepts. It doesn't only tell you what an OS should looks like, but also tells you why it looks like that.

I especially loves the chapters about concurrency. Classical problems such as critical section, semaphore(sleeping barber), monitors, message passinb, readers/writers problem, dining philosophers etc are all discussed with a great detail. The texts explain the concepts step by step, the pseudocode allows you understand how to implement them, no matter which programming languages you use. It helps me a lot with I do the programming assignments.

I am giving this book 3 stars because it's of mixed quality. Whenever there's a obvious problem that needs to be solved, as in the case of handling RAID, concurrency, replacement of memory blocks, etc., the book is a decent one with only a few rough edges. My problem with the book is that a lot of times, what the author is trying to accomplish isn't clear to me, and I just keep asking "so what" but the book of course doesn't talk back. I hope a few examples will illustrate my point:

at one point in the book, the author gave a list of reasons why a process would stop; a process stops because it's done, or the user stops it, or it did something illegal - and why is that important? Besides, I thought every computer user knows stuff like that... To put it another way, I feel the author in general spent way too much time describing things and defining things, things that are set in stone but are mostly irrelavent because you really want to study the things that you can change - you want to be where all the "issues" are at; For me, reasons for ending a process are set in stone - all OS will end a process for basically the same reason

his definitions are especially annoying - the author use a lot of jargons when it's not really called for; what's worse is the stupidity of some of it - on the chapter about security, he "defined" everyday words like "secret" - without saying how "secret" differs in computer science from the "secret" in real life - to me a secret is the same in computer science as in real life;

I admit there are hard parts to the book, but some of the book is rediculously dumb and seem totally out of place; example: the author tried to "define" the floppy drive... zz... zz... It's only a sentence or two, but in the mist of everything it's just really dumb - I am clueless as to how this author decides what to put into the book and what to exclude

and one time he modified two lines of a program - but didn't say which; well, the program is short but at that stage, the pseudo code "signal( )" and "wait( )" is new to the reader so finding the modification is uncomfortable for me at least - he could have easily put those 2 modified lines in bold and he didn't

and I think he resorted to math way too often ; math should be employed only if good old intuition fails

I can go on and on, but to avoid being too long winded and wasting your time, my feeling is that this book has a lot of info but also a lot of rough edges and garbage (as in pointless writing). Also, he goes way too fast with the minor topics. The sections on NT, Solaris, Unix, queuing analysis, etc. all look more like summaries when they are suppose to be intros.

I adopted the book for my COMP279 Operating System course. The book is up-to-date, illustrating the current technology with real examples. Textbook especially explains the thread concept very clearly as no other textbooks do. Together with multiprocessor scheduling chapter, the book is essential textbook for every OS course.

I am currently using this book as the text for my CMPB214 Operating Systems course at Universiti Tenaga Nasional, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I picked the book after comparing it with other OS text books by other authors. Good overview and discussions of various issues in Operating Systems design with current OS examples.

This book is wordy and confusing. The questions at the end of each chapter could only be answered if you have experience with operaing systems and computers. This is not a beginners book. It is probably a fine graduate level book or a an adv. operating systems book in undergraduate. BUT NOT A FIRST COURSE IN OPERATING SYSTEMS.