Operating System Concepts [Hardcover]

The authors provide a quite exhaustive and up to date [circa 2011] explanation of the main operating systems in deployment. The level of the narrative is suited for an undergraduate senior level or graduate level class in computing.

The book is well reinforced by an integration with the online Wiley Plus website. On this you can get source code appropriate to each chapter, as well as solutions to the practice exercises. This frees up the text from having to provide space to list the source code or answers, which you often see in other texts.

The chapters are configured with 2 sets of exercises; the practice ones being the first set and simpler. This format lets you, if you are the instructor for a college course, assign the second set as homework. Also, the website offers more problems and answers to those. For the instructor or dedicated student, this is a value added bonus. Plus the website has another nifty feature - a simulator of an operating system. Instructors who have been in this field long enough might have seen cases where a computer course might have had this, but implemented locally on that department's machines, so that students had something tangible they could run their assembly code on. While this is vital, the problem was the effort needed in writing that simulator. It is a great timesaver to have it here as the book's companion.

Overall, the pedagogy strikes a good balance between the traditional book-only mode of instruction and going the much ballyhooed pure DVD or web or e-book reader approach.

Chapter 8 on the main memory is a well written account of how a user program goes from source code to run time. It explains the key ideas of the functioning of a memory management unit and logical and physical addresses. Related to this are static and dynamic loading, where the latter uses dynamically linked libraries. If you are a student who has probably already used computers, you have heard these terms before. But the book now gives you a firm grasp on what these actually mean.

Chapters 10 and 11 on the file system should be read as one logical entity. These offer the idea that at the level of the operating system, it operates on user data at the level of files. That file management is the central duty of any operating system, from the user's standpoint.

The book also has a nice discussion of the notorious Morris Internet worm, which was unleashed in 1988 on Vaxes and Suns. I remember it quite well when I was at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. There was briefly some anxious concern about a malign penetration of the Lab, but the infected machines were quickly fixed and no data was corrupted or copied over the network. The global extent of the worm and the lack of damage to the filesystems now seems quaint compared to the more virulent malware in circulation on an Internet of computers some 3 or 4 orders of magnitude larger.

By the way, there is relatively little [effectively none] discussion about the Internet Protocol, either in its 32 bit v4 or 128 bit v6 versions. This reflects the fact that even today the concepts and implementations of an operating system are largely independent of and orthogonal to the IP. While the book goes into networks of machines, the focus is clearly on how single machines work. And when there are indeed discussions of higher level network protocols, notably the seminal Network File Systems, these require little or no low level forays into IP details.

A little lengthy but does the job. I bought the kindle version and it was like a PDF only works on a PC.

I bought this book because it was the prescribed text book for my course. Each chapter is unnecessarily lengthy and the Authors fail to explain most of the concepts clearly. I am surprised why a lot of the Universities prescribe this book over others. If your intentions are just about passing your OS course, then this book might just come handy. But if you are intended to learn actually how stuff works, then there are tons of better books on this subject, try them before falling a prey for this book.

In my opinion, "Operating Systems" by William Stallings is way better. Stallings explains each, and every concept very clearly and with just the right amount of text(no verbal diarrhea as in the case of this book). You might also want to check out the book by Gary Nutt.