general

I've taken 2 operating systems courses at 2 different universities that used different editions of this book. In both classes, the biggest benefit came from the teachers and not the text. It encapsulates concepts from every major operating system in use today, but it's too general to do anything with. You can't use this book to help you write code because everything is at such a high level. It is good as a reference point to understand operating systems concepts...hence the title :) The process and memory coverage is great, although the process synchronization chapter didn't help my understanding much. If you're interested in learning the ideas behind the nuts and bolts of operating systems (what is a process? what is a thread? what is virtual memory? how do these things work in a general sense and on different systems?), read this book. If you want to implement those nuts and bolts (how would I implement this in my OS environment?), this book by itself won't help you much.

I gave the book 3 stars because the book can confuse you if you let it. My first profesor presented the material in a very confusing way. My next profesor did a better job but it still wasnt great. If you take it for what it is, a coverage of general concepts only, it makes the reading a lot easier. That's my conclusion :)

Almost bought this in the store until I noticed there were case studies for both Win2K and WinXP. These are very similar operating systems and, sure enough, the text for the chapters is exactly the same for most of these two chapters. I do not understand why interesting operating systems [FreeBSD, Mach] were left online in order that these two redundant chapters could be printed. Were it not for my familiarity with previous editions, I would assume the authors knew very little about OS concepts if they thought that covering 2K and XP would provide two distinct case studies for comparison. In short, the 2K coverage should have been replaced by one of the online chapters.

This is the only textbook we used for our OS class at university. My interests lie in systems programming and some low-level interfacing using high level languages but this book really didn't help me much. I was looking forward to this subject but disappointed because the lecturer basically took this book as the bible and made no references to other sources. If this book was to create a religion and my lecturer was the pope then I wouldn't be surprised if there were so many factions like in Christianity...because of the confusing presentation of the subject. Half of the time I was consulting Google because of the nearly useless examples in the book. At one point I was arguing about a vaguely explained topic with my lecturer. I was using other texts as my references but unfortunately my lecturer was pushing his own interpretation of the topic.