Customer Reviews

Writing MS-Dos Device Drivers

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If you are even reading this review, it is probably because you, for one reason or another, need to write an MS-DOS device driver. I was in the same boat, and this book saved me.

I could not have done it without it. So little material remains about DOS device drivers.

This book provides detailed information on writting both character and block device drivers. Many examples are provided as this book guides you toward the development of more complex drivers.

Most of this book assumes that your are knowledgable in Assembly Language programming. However, the most useful section for me was a framework for developing device drivers in C.

This book covers most aspects of MS-DOS drivers.Actually, after reading the book i have now understood the structure of MS-DOS, how MS-DOS treats drivers and the differences between the different versions of MS-DOS.
I bought that book due to a project of a course on my university.I never compiled the actual driver i had to(a serial driver) but instead i wrote only the report (how the driver should be implemented and an assembly code, which i never compiled).So, this review covers only the theoretical view of the book, which i can reassure you that it is beyond your expectations.
It is also clear that the author of the book (Mr Lai) is not a scientist, but instead he is a very experienced and professional programmer, a real engineer who can understand anyone which, in fact, makes reading easier.
Probably the book is absolute nowadays but anyone who want to learn who device drivers work in MS-DOS i fully recommend it(actually i haven't found any other book with the same topic).

This is an excellent book. Approaching device drivers via DOS is probably the best method to understanding device drivers in general. As to previous comments that the examples were written in assembly rather than C, this is a strength, not a weakness. Many drivers during the heyday of DOS were written in assembly. And while assembly is. admittedly, a difficult language in which to program, it does force you to stick your head into the hardware and keep it there (which is what device drivers are all about).
The only negative comment is that the book cannot be viewed on the Amazon website, particularly the table of contents and an excerpt.

This book just for beginers. Also, there is lot of assembly example instead of C language.