Operating Systems: Internals and Design Principles (5th Edition) (GOAL Series) (Hardcover)

by William Stallings (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

This book covers concepts, structure, and mechanisms of operating systems. Stallings presents the nature and characteristics of modern-day operating systems clearly and completely. Includes major programming projects. Offers step-by-step web support with CD/Rom Resources. A basic reference for those interested in learning more about operating systems; also suitable for self-study.

From the Back Cover
Blending up-to-date theory with state-of-the-art applications, this book offers a comprehensive treatment of operating systems, with an emphasis on internals and design issues. It helps readers develop a solid understanding of the key structures and mechanisms of operating systems, the types of trade-offs and decisions involved in OS design, and the context within which the operating system functions (hardware, other system programs, application programs, interactive users). Process Description And Control. Threads, SMP, And Microkernels. Concurrency: Mutual Exclusion And Synchronization. Concurrency: Deadlock And Starvation. Memory Management. Virtual Memory. Uniprocessor Scheduling. Multiprocessor And Real-Time Scheduling. I/O Management And Disk Scheduling. File Management. Distributed Processing, Client/Server, And Clusters. Distributed Process Management. Security. For product development personnel (Programmers, Systems Engineers, Network Designers, and others involved in the design of data communications and networking products), Product marketing personnel, and Information system and computer system personnel. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 832 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 5 edition (July 22, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0131479547
• ISBN-13: 978-0131479548
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #597,177 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #49 in

  Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > APIs & Operating Environments > Operating Systems Theory

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Improving, but not really a classic, July 24, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Operating Systems: Internals and Design Principles (4th Edition) (Hardcover)

I have taught operating systems at the graduate level for the last 5 years. In other areas of computer science, I've been spoiled by classic textbooks (e.g. Aho, Sethi and Ullman's "Compilers: Principles Designs and Tools", aka "The Dragon Book" for compiler design, Hennessy and Patterson's "Computer Architecture a Quantitative Approach", etc.) Computer Operating systems is a mature field, yet no textbook reaches classic stature in Operating Systems. Previous editions of the textbook have had serious errata in the problem sets (it i embarrassing to assign unsolvable problems to students) I no longer use any problems from this book as a result.

However, among Operating Systems textbooks, there are primarily 2 categories, those with example code (e.g. Tannenbaums) and survey books. This is a survey book (sometimes called theoretical, but not in the Automata Theory or Algorithms sense). It has some overview of design principles and some analysis, which makes it better than the others I've seen, but still leaves a bit to be desired, I feel it is still a bit too qualitative. I'd like to see more back of the envelope analysis (like say Patterson and Hennessy's book). The section on scheduling is pretty good, with some nice analysis, and the queueing theory section is useful for first year grads and upper division undergrads. Still, I need to assign quite a bit of additional literature.

33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good reference, maybe. Not very readable!, February 14, 2005

By	Michael Lehenbauer (Redmond, WA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

My Operating Systems course used this book and we were assigned chapters to read every week. It was incredibly painful. This book does not read well at all. The ideas aren't very well motivated. Many times, Stallings just enumerates a list of alternate strategies for solving a problem without talking AT ALL about how the strategies came or why we should think about all these different strategies in the first place. He just lists and describes them. Very dry.

I eventually stopped reading the book and just used it as a reference when doing our open book online quizzes. This worked well. It's easy to find specific information ("How does Round Robin Scheduling work?") and the explanations are reasonably clear and concise. But if you're trying to actually read it sequentially to get the general idea, you're in for some pain (and sleepiness).

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A hundred and eight dollars for THIS?!?, November 29, 2005

By	Justin Playfair - See all my reviews

Based on content alone I'd probably have given this book three stars. It contains a lot of outdated (read: mainframe-centric) information which I could probably overlook as an artifact of this being an old back that has been updated through the years to reflect the more PC-centric nature of the industry.

Unfortunately, I have to subtract a star because some of the problems at the ends of the chapters CAN'T BE ANSWERED BY THE INFORMATION CONTAINED WITHIN THE BOOK! Yep, you heard right, it has problems that relate to concepts not covered in the book. For example, in chapter 11 there are questions (11.7, 118) about record formats on magnetic tape that requires knowledge of concepts not covered anywhere in the chapter or elsewhere in the book.

Another interesting example of this is in chapter 1, which includes some problems (1.3, 1.4, 1.5) related to hardware concepts never discussed. What's particularly interesting about these questions is that they're IDENTICAL to questions asked in a different book (by a different author, Dr. Nikitas Alexandris) titled "Computer Systems Architecture: Microprocessor-Based Designs." That book actually COVERS the topics upon which the questions are based. What a concept, huh? Hopefully Dr. Alexandris knows that the questions from his title have been "borrowed" for this one, but in any case the questions are completely out of place in this book since it doesn't give the reader the information to be able to answer them.