Operating System Concepts, 6th Edition

Good book for learning OS principles for undergrad and lower grad students. I recommend this for hose wanting an introduction to OS Internals.I prefer this to Modern OS by Tanenbaum.

This book does a great job of presenting all details of operating system design and operation. When appropriate, the authors point out how Linux, Solaris or Windows implements a given topic. This is valuable for software developers who work on these platform and need to understand how the scheduler is going to react if you spawn new threads/processes.The one bad thing I can say is that some examples are too general and do not convey the proper detail. This is just a minor distraction and does not take away from the book's overall effectiveness.

This is a review of the 5th and 6th editions of Operating Systems Concepts, by Avi Silberschatz and Peter Galvin; Greg Gagne was their co-author on the 6th edition. More recent editions are available which I haven't yet read. For readers of this review, the main advantage of the 5th and 6th editions is that you can buy them very cheaply here on Amazon.com from a 3rd-party bookseller. For example, at this very moment, I see that a used copy of the 6th edition can be picked up for only $2.48 before shipping and handling. That is the bargain of year! If you can afford a newer edition, by all means, go for it.Anyway, even in spite of their having been superseded by more recent editions, the 5th and 6th editions are each an excellent introduction to operating systems concepts. It is to be hoped that CIS and MIS majors will use this book in their introductory course on operating systems, instead of a book that focuses only on Windows. IT, MIS and networking professionals whose only experience with operating systems has been the desktop and/or server version of Microsoft's or Apple's OSes, or Linux, should also read -- and re-read -- this book. It will make them more well-rounded professionals and enable them to recognize and intelligently consider issues that need to be looked at from an operating systems perspective. Other professionals will benefit from reading (and re-reading this) this book too. For example, product managers at telcos who make product catalog decisions about routers, PBXes, smartphones, or any other equipment that runs an operating system, will benefit from this book too, since it will enable them to factor operating system considerations into their decision-making process.

Being a 3rd year comp sci major this is by far one of the hardest books to read. Not saying that because of its technicality but because the examples and explanations inside the book are extremely vague and abstract. Subjects tend skip here and there, worst of all statements lack clear cut examples, and remain muddy. In the worst cases, distinct subjects seperated in paragraphs bleed from one paragraph to another which is extremely frustrating to read and understand. It seems as if the authors used a cut and paste and mistakenly pasted one paragraph into another. Ultimately, I found myself taking a black marker and crossing out irrelevant sentences, and there is a lot of them.Unfortunately My school uses this book so I do not have much of a choice whether I want it or not. I would not recommend this book as a source of learning this subject if you have a choice on this matter.

its a book.

This book attempts to be a generic introduction to operating systems, and therefore never really gets super deep. It covers most of the basic tenents of how the O/S works, but generally demonstrates trivial solutions while only hinting at how real production systems handle the problems raised, but hey, this is an intro text. The first few chapters did seem more indepth to me, but it could just be that I had a fairly high understanding of the material by the time I reached the end. I do think it could have better illustrated the differences between Windows and the various *nix's, but it tried, and there was not an obvious bios for or against any particular O/S.

Not a very good book. Had to buy it for a class.

I think this book is one of the most helpful I've read for developing my software engineering skills. I originally had the 5th edition as an undergraduate. We didn't have to read the whole book, and, quite frankly, at the time, I wouldn't have probably read it even if we did. But, once I started working, I started reading the book (for personal edification?), and was about halfway through when I saw that the sixth edition was out. I ordered it, gave away my fifth edition, and started over at the beginning so that I wouldn't miss any of the updates. I think that when it comes to learning threading it's an excellent reference. But beyond that, there are a lot of operating system concepts (virtual memory, security, clustering, and I could go on) that have plenty of applications in non-OS development projects. It's true that this book doesn't provide code examples, but the concepts are well described and it would be difficult to provide meaningful, concise code to illustrate most of the concepts. I think a good developer can take these concepts and use them to solve a variety of problems. I very much recommend this book, it's clearly written and very informative.

Very interesting book, even though it's a quite old edition I don't feel as a newer book would have tought me anything more. I just had this course at my university and I used this book as reference.

this book is in a very good condition. although its a old edition, it still has some great informations. i recommend it to computer science students whose take operating systems lesson.

Book is falling apart

Well written book that covers the topics well. Helped on my studies.