Open-source operating systems, virtual machines, and clustered computing are among the leading fields of operating systems and networking that are rapidly changing. With substantial revisions and organizational changes, Silberschatz, Galvin, and Gagne’s Operating System Concepts, Eighth Edition remains as current and relevant as ever, helping you master the fundamental concepts of operating systems while preparing yourself for today’s emerging developments.

As in the past, the text brings you up to speed on core knowledge and skills, including:

• What operating systems are, what they do, and how they are designed and constructed
• Process, memory, and storage management
• Protection and security
• Distributed systems
• Special-purpose systems

Beyond the basics, the Eight Edition sports substantive revisions and organizational changes that clue you in to such cutting-edge developments as open-source operating systems, multi-core processors, clustered computers, virtual machines, transactional memory, NUMA, Solaris 10 memory management, Sun’s ZFS file system, and more. New to this edition is the use of a simulator to dynamically demonstrate several operating system topics.

Best of all, a greatly enhanced WileyPlus, a multitude of new problems and programming exercises, and other enhancements to this edition all work together to prepare you enter the world of operating systems with confidence.

Professor Silberschatz is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. He received the 2002 IEEE Taylor L. Booth Education Award, the 1998 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, and the 1997 ACM SIGMOD Contribution Award. In recognition of his outstanding level of innovation and technical excellence, he was awarded the Bell Laboratories President's Award for three different Projects -- the QTM Project (1998), the DataBlitz Project (1999), and the NetInventory Project (2004).

Professor Silberschatz' writings have appeared in numerous ACM and IEEE publications and other professional conferences and journals. He is a coauthor of the textbook Database System Concepts. He has also written Op-Ed articles for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Hartford Courant, among others.

Peter Baer Galvin is the chief technologist for Corporate Technologies (www.cptech.com), a computer facility reseller and integrator. Before that, Mr. Galvin was the systems manager for Brown University's Computer Science Department. He is also Sun columnist for ;login: magazine. Mr. Galvin has written articles for Byte and other magazines, and has written columns for SunWorld and SysAdmin magazines. As a consultant and trainer, he has given talks and taught tutorials on security and system administration worldwide.

Greg Gagne is chair of the Computer Science department at Westminster College in Salt Lake City where he has been teaching since 1990. In addition to teaching operating systems, he also teaches computer networks, distributed systems, and software engineering. He also provides workshops to computer science educators and industry professionals.