Inside Microsoft Windows 2000, Third Edition (Microsoft Programming Series) (Paperback)

by David A. Solomon (Author), Mark E. Russinovich (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Microsoft Windows 2000 internals have a very logical structure. In Inside Microsoft Windows 2000, David Solomon and Mark Russinovich explain what goes on behind the curtain as Windows 2000 manages memory, regulates access to input and output devices, controls persistent storage, communicates with the network, and does the rest of its duties as a modern operating system. This is a text for programmers, and it's packed with call-by-call documentation of what happens when Windows 2000 is told to perform various operations. There's not as much code in this book as you might expect--mostly, it's text. Once you have the architecture figured out, you should be able to implement your code more easily.

The chapter on memory management exemplifies this careful approach to Windows 2000 internals. What memory management does is discussed (it maps the virtual memory range of threads into registers on physical devices, and handles overflow from volatile memory onto disk). Then, you learn the more obvious ways of observing and tweaking memory performance (the Performance tab in Task Manager and the Registry). Finally, you get detailed information on how Windows 2000 handles mapping, and the use of dozens of memory-related Win32 API calls. --David Wall

Topics covered: The Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system kernel and its internal operations; the specific behaviors of various subsystems, including memory management, threading, security, caching, and network communications.

Review
"If you’re a serious network admin or programmer this video is an excellent resource for concepts, techniques and tools. -- MCP Magazine

"The ultimate OS resource for the Windows IT professional." -- Windows & .NET Magazine,David Chernicoff --This text refers to the CD-ROM edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 600 pages
• Publisher: Microsoft Press; 3rd edition (September 16, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735610215
• ISBN-13: 978-0735610217
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 2.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #357,354 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent comprehensive overview, August 29, 2000

By	Thobias Jones (Redmond, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

When I first heard that Russinovich was teaming with Solomon to do the 3rd edition of this book, I knew the potential of what this book could be. Now that I have it, I can firmly say that it surpasses every one of my expectations.

Solomon and Russinovich do a great job covering all grounds well. Topics range from the extremely low level of boot process, device drivers, exceptions, and page tables to the high level structures of the object manager, file systems, and cache management.

Odd topics such as networking and security complete the discussion. This book is an excellent complement to Richter's Programming Applications book, with very little overlapping content. It is so complete, in fact, that it could almost be used as a blueprint to clone Windows, if one so desired.

This book is very light on code and very heavy on diagrams and tables. It is so clearly written that turning the information into usable code should be a breeze.

If I had to complain, there is a lack of native application discussion. But this is pushing it, as the sysinternals web site is included on CD and includes this material.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 2000 Systems Programming at its best!!!, September 13, 2001

By	Thomas M. Schaefer (Washington DC USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As a former systems programmer on Burroughs (Unisys) systems, I was always used to knowing how the OS did things. It is a real treat after working on PCs for so long, to finally get a book that makes it interesting to learn the internals again. This book is full of things that will give you an appreciation of any OS, but the way it cracks into the guts of 2000 is great. The experiments in this book make it really easy to learn how 2000 is organized and apply it to existing programming projects. Learning 2000 from the inside via the debugger is just a great way to do it. No offense to David, but Mark's influence is obvious. If you are a fan of his Internals column, you will like this book even better. The fact that he does it without source code is even more amazing. Wait a minute...why hasn't Microsoft paid these guys whatever they want to build the next version of 2000?
If you appreciate a good OS and an even better manual on it...Buy This Book...

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Practical Magic in Win32, April 18, 2001

By	George Datuashvili "gia" (CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is the book to take with you if you are expelled to deserted island with 1 laptop, solar power generator, win32 sdk/ddk, and 1 book of choice. It will make you think, wonder, appreciate and grok the best OS that Microsoft can offer. As Matt Pietrek said once, the magic of being debugger guru is the better understanding of OS. If there is any book to help you become one, this is it.

What is very important also is that along the line Mark (and David) explain and teach the reverse engineering techniques to explore the surrounding world of unknown black-box software. The books if full of ideas, hints and tips on multiple ways how to peek under the hood and extract that piece of information you are looking for.

It made me to fully understand and re-think the implications of thread scheduling, memory management, paging and synchronization on the complex code I was working with and resulted in great performance improvements.

You will also get to see the elegance of design decisions and compromises made by engineers working on such a complex OS, and this enlightening experience alone justifies reading of the book even if you are not interested in Win32 in any way.

It is incredible amount of knowledge and hard work compressed in a single volume.