Customer Reviews

Operating Systems: A Systematic View (6th Edition)

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

 

 

While this text is getting old, it is still relevant. The concepts presented are still of primary concern. It nicely takes the student thru a simple OS and thru complex ones, e.g. UNIX and IBM's MVS, to introduce virtual memory, paging, scheduling, resource contention, and so forth. And, the student does not need 3 years of CS courses to get thru the book. For a 2 year course, or for those needing to know about Operating systems, but not the "gory" details of coding them, this is an excellent work.

I have been teaching with it since the second edition. It took a long time to find a book like this. The student workbook is an excellent addition as well.

If you are looking for a text that only covers Microsoft operating systems then this is not your book. BUT, if you want a book to teach the fundamentals of an operating system as a platform for today's bread and butter applications(AR, AP, BILLING, SA, INVENTORY, ETC) then this is super. The current world of new computer-ist they only know/learn the Microsoft systems. The bulk of processing done today is still in the backrooms with mainframe & midrange range systems using MVS, VM, VME, UNIX(and similars), and OS/400s, which Microsoft Win/95/98/NTs don't touch. This is for the student that must interface with the total computer industry not just word processing and INTERNET. It should be complimented with a good Win/98/NT bible type book.

I do wish it was updated a little.

Unlike other OS books I've seen, A Systematic View is a clearly written, concise introduction to the foundations of operating systems -- or at least the first few chapters are. As noted by other reviewers, the book doesn't know where to go after the first section -- it meanders into too-brief-to-be-useful hands-on tutorial sections for the middle portion, then moves on to touch open a few particulars with a few popular systems in a way remniscent of excerpts from a heavier text before concluding with a section on distributed computing (the bulk of which concerns remote file access via CIFS/SMB). Scattered amongst the latter half of the book are some decent portions on virtual memory and x86 architectural features.

The book would benefit greatly from having the tutorials moved to online appendices, the OS-specific analysis moved to standard appendices, and the core principles delved into more deeply. Davis and Rajkumar could also do with a few more technical proofreaders; while grammatical, spelling, and typographical errors are kept to a minimum, terminology is used oddly at best throughout the work with many of the "real-world" examples being flat-out wrong.

Reservations aside, I have not found a more approachable introductory/survey text. It's just a pity that there are so many problems with it even in the 6th edition. With a bit of work this could be a respectable upper-division text, but at the moment I can only recommend it for two-year technical/community colleges.

This book gives excellent explanation of how an operating system works and will suit a new computer user or someone on a more advanced level. The only downfall of this book was its limited text on Linux. Otherwise its a great book and worth having!

This is not a college-level text. It includes shallow coverage of topics one would expect in an OS course, but not at a level appropriate of such a course, and then spends a tremendous amount of space on computer literacy issues, like how to use MS-DOS and Unix command lines, etc. I think the authors couldn't decide whether they wanted to write an OS text for non-majors, or a computer literacy text.

In their preface, the authors seem confused about the meanings of the words "applied" and "theoretical," saying this is an applied text, and suggesting that texts for actual OS courses are theoretical. While I will grant them that pretty much any other OS text out there has more theoretical content, this one also has less applicable content than most.

Had the cover and preface made it clear this text was predominantly a computer literacy text, I'd have had no problem with it, nor would it have made its way to my bookshelf. But the title, the text on the back cover, and the preface are all misleading.

Operating Systems a Systematic View is written in clear, easily understandable language and is copiously illustrated. Unfortunately it virtues end there. I used this book as the text in the "Introduction to Operating Systems" at University of Phoenix. Both the course and the text were wanting.

The text starts with a high level description of basic operating system functions that are common to all operating systems. This is the best section of the book. It benefits from the clear writing used throughout the book.Since it is a high level over view it is not hindered by its' superficiality, as the
rest of the book is.

The book then includes a description of UNIX, MVS, Windows 2000 and surprisingly, MS DOS. These are suitable to a very naive user who has never seen the operating system. They only provide a brief overview of each system. We are then treated to an extremely brief summary of each systems scripting or Job Control Language. If fact they are so brief as to be useless. These sections should have been left out.

The text then leaps into a detailed description of each systems virtual memory management system. These sections are too superficial to benefit anyone who will actually be attempting system programing. They are to detailed to be worth while to someone who will not be doing system programing.

The reader would have been better served by less introductory material on each OS, and by complete elimination of the discussion of virtual memory management. Instead that space should have been replaced by a more in depth study of the scripting and job control languages and by a look at performance tuning. The time spent of describing the data structures of the Windows virtual memory could better have been spent learning what parameters of the operating
system can be tuned, and how to measure them.

I had to purchase this book for one of my classes. Its doesn't go into much detail, i knew everything in the book before i even opened it. But for someone who has no concept of OS's i.e. Linux, OS X, and Windows...could be of some use I suppose.

I'd purchased this book for a computer class & I have to say that I did like the book. I'll admit, it wasn't the most thrilling textbook I had to read, but it did list things pretty clearly.

The beginning of the book had some pretty basic stuff, which I already knew but I suppose that there's people out there who are even more of a newbie than I am & didn't know some of that stuff.

This is a good textbook, but I'm interested in seeing what the next edition has in comparison to this one.

However, one should have some basic understandings before start reading this book.
You can learn everything about the main types operating systems from it .

Book is exactly as stated. A+++,, Shipping was fast... Will buy from the seller next time...