My View

A great book.... A not so great book... This book is a very good reference. It has good technical information on the various x86 CPU's from Intel, AMD, Cyrix, IBM, etc. Good reference for older chips (8042 keyboard, etc) but for the really good juicy bits.. its lacking... why? It has a great introduction to the APIC (Advanced PIC) and PCI, but you get no programming information on either. It also has no programming info on PNP hardware.

I've also noticed a few mistakes in some of the "source" and other examples.

Defiantly recommended but lacking in a few examples.

My View

I have not read this book so can't comment.

Book blurb on amazon.com

This best-selling book, now in its fifth edition, provides a solid theoretical foundation for understanding operating systems. Authors Abraham Silberschatz and Peter Galvin discuss key concepts that are applicable to a variety of systems. They also present a large number of examples taken from common operating systems, including Windows and Solaris 2. This book thus teaches general notions in operating systems while giving the teacher and students the flexibility to choose the implementation system. New in this Edition: A section on I/O Systems comprises three chapters on I/O Systems, Secondary-Storage Structure, and Tertiary-Storage Structure. Two case studies illustrate Windows NT and Linux. Chapters on Memory Management, Virtual Memory, Network Structures, and Security have been updated significantly. Online version of the case-study chapter on Mach and of the appendix on the Nachos operating-system project are in place

My View

Quite a good book, this is the one that "got the ball rolling" for most people. It is also the book with the Minix Source code in it. The version I read had the original 1.1 minux source code (it was an old book), I assume the code is updated when the book was given a general overhaul.

My View

Seems to be a popular college/uni course book. If anyone has read it write a review!

The blurb reads; Blending up-to-date theory with modern applications, this book offers a comprehensive treatment of operating systems with an emphasis on internals and design issues. KEY TOPICS: The use of Windows NT, UNIX SVR4, and Solaris 2.x as running case studies through the book motivates the material and enhances understanding. Expanded treatment of multithreading and object-oriented design, together with new coverage of microkernels, SMP, and clusters. Provides a solid understanding of the key mechanisms of operating systems and the types of design trade-offs and decisions. A broad and unified treatment of distributed operating systems thoroughly covers this area of increasing importance, including process and thread migration, distributed file systems, mutual exclusion and deadlock, and clusters.

Jerry Coffin's View

If you're interested in network operating systems, and distributed operating systems, this is definitely a good read. It covers quite a few things that also apply to some forms of loosely-coupled multi-processor machines.

Jerry Coffin's View

While this doesn't give as much detail about some areas as I'd like, it's a great improvement (IMO) over the first edition. If you're interested in something other than the UNIX family, this is a good place to start -- NT is related to VMS, which tends to follow a different path from UNIX in a number of areas.

Jerry Coffin's View

This is about an _old_ (1975 or so) version of UNIX. The source code won't compile on a modern compiler, but it's close enough to modern C that anybody who knows C can understand most of what's going on fairly easily. The second half of the book is devoted to a line-by-line commentary on exactly what each part of the source code is doing and why. While most of the details in UNIX have changed, the basic concepts have not. This is an excellent introduction to the overall operation of UNIX or any UNIX-like system.

Jerry Coffin's View

This covers most of the basic changes in structure and content that have taken place in recent versions of UNIX. At one time, most versions of UNIX were quite minimal ports of code from AT&T. More recently, individual companies have done considerably more to create their own individual versions of UNIX. This book does not attempt to analyze lines of code, but gives an overview of the basic concepts used in 4.x BSD, HP-UX, SunOS and Solaris, Digital Unix and Mach-OSF/1 and so on.