I am giving this book 3 stars because it's of mixed quality. Whenever there's a obvious problem that needs to be solved, as in the case of handling RAID, concurrency, replacement of memory blocks, etc., the book is a decent one with only a few rough edges. My problem with the book is that a lot of times, what the author is trying to accomplish isn't clear to me, and I just keep asking "so what" but the book of course doesn't talk back. I hope a few examples will illustrate my point:
at one point in the book, the author gave a list of reasons why a process would stop; a process stops because it's done, or the user stops it, or it did something illegal - and why is that important? Besides, I thought every computer user knows stuff like that... To put it another way, I feel the author in general spent way too much time describing things and defining things, things that are set in stone but are mostly irrelavent because you really want to study the things that you can change - you want to be where all the "issues" are at; For me, reasons for ending a process are set in stone - all OS will end a process for basically the same reason
his definitions are especially annoying - the author use a lot of jargons when it's not really called for; what's worse is the stupidity of some of it - on the chapter about security, he "defined" everyday words like "secret" - without saying how "secret" differs in computer science from the "secret" in real life - to me a secret is the same in computer science as in real life;
I admit there are hard parts to the book, but some of the book is rediculously dumb and seem totally out of place; example: the author tried to "define" the floppy drive... zz... zz... It's only a sentence or two, but in the mist of everything it's just really dumb - I am clueless as to how this author decides what to put into the book and what to exclude
and one time he modified two lines of a program - but didn't say which; well, the program is short but at that stage, the pseudo code "signal( )" and "wait( )" is new to the reader so finding the modification is uncomfortable for me at least - he could have easily put those 2 modified lines in bold and he didn't
and I think he resorted to math way too often ; math should be employed only if good old intuition fails
I can go on and on, but to avoid being too long winded and wasting your time, my feeling is that this book has a lot of info but also a lot of rough edges and garbage (as in pointless writing). Also, he goes way too fast with the minor topics. The sections on NT, Solaris, Unix, queuing analysis, etc. all look more like summaries when they are suppose to be intros.
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