Operating System Concepts: Amazon.co.uk: Abraham Silberschatz, Peter B. Galvin, Greg Gagne: Books

Amazon.co.uk Review

Operating systems are large and complex, and yet must function with near-absolute reliability--that's why they're a class unto themselves in the field of software development. Since its first release 20 years ago, "the dinosaur book"--Operating System Concepts by Avi Silberschatz, Peter Baer Galvin, and Greg Gagne--has been a valuable reference for designers and implementers of operating systems. The newly released sixth edition of this book maintains the volume's authority with new sections on thread management, distributed processes, and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). There's also information on the workings of the latest crop of operating systems, including Microsoft Windows 2000, Linux, FreeBSD, and compact operating systems for handheld devices.

This book is concerned with the design of operating systems, which is to say it enumerates the problems that pop up in the creation of efficient systems and explores alternative ways of dealing with them, detailing the advantages and shortcomings of each. For example, in their chapter on scheduling CPU activity, the authors explain several algorithms (first-come, first-served, and round-robin scheduling, among others) for allocating the capacity of single and multiple processors among jobs. They highlight the relative advantages of each, and explain how several real-life operating systems solve the problem. They then present the reader with exercises--this book is essentially a university textbook--that inspire thought and discussion. --David Wall

Topics covered: The problems faced by designers of system software for electronic computers, and strategies that have been developed over the past 20 years to address (and, in some cases, solve ) them. Problems of CPU scheduling, memory allocation, paging, processes and threads, storage management, distributed processes and storage mechanisms, and security are all discussed thoroughly and with many authoritative references.

Product Description

Celebrating its 20th anniversary, Silberschatz: Operating Systems Concepts, Sixth Edition, continues to provide a solid theoretical foundation for understanding operating systems. The Sixth Edition offers improved conceptual coverage and added content to bridge the gap between concepts and actual implementations. Threads has been added to this latest edition and includes coverage of Pthreads and Java threads. All code examples have been rewritten and are now in C. Increased coverage of small footprint operating systems such as PalmOS and real–time operating system, as well as a new chapter on Windows 2000, have been added.
Market: Computer Scientists; Programmers.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

A student from U of H, Texas 29 Aug 2001

By jason_yuen@hotmail.com

Format:Hardcover

This book gives an excellent introduction to complexity; while also containing some details of more advanced topics in the field. It's an excellent book if you're not too confident in your operating system. However, if you are an expert in computer science, you will find this book quite bored.

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Nice real-life examples, but badly organized and written 6 Jan 1999

By A Customer

I really tried to like this book, but it kept annoying me profoundly with repetitious, simplistic coverage of issues that I found more pithily explained in Andrew Tanenbaum's "Operating Systems : Design and Implementation" (I'd definitely recommend that book over this one). On the plus side, there are some nice sidebars on real OSes, such as a fine presentation of the Solaris lightweight process model. But overall a disappointment: the book seems to have been rewritten too many times to have coherence.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

few concepts confusing but overall excellent!! 16 Mar 1998

Excellent book for beginners. I enjoyed reading it, but i noticed that there are many repeated paragraphs throughout the text. This makes exam studies tedious.