From: Operating systems teaching

The comments below have been provided by a variety of people, so any
`me's or `I's you encounter are not necessarily those of the
maintainer!

- `Operating Systems Concepts', fourth edition, by Abraham
  Silberschatz and Peter Galvin is the latest version of this popular
  text.  Addison-Wesley, 1994, ISBN 0-201-50480.  This book has been
  revised to include new and updated information, examples, diagrams,
  and an expanded bibliography.

  I think this is the `standard' OS text, although I have a couple of
  others that I also think are good, and that I draw from when I teach
  OS.  Previous editions of the dinosaur book don't have the greatest
  organisation, and sometimes wander when describing things.  Its
  strong point lies in the copious examples.

  Speaking of the third edition (I haven't seen a copy of the fourth
  edition yet):

    The first 84 pages cover operating system basics, the next 120
    pages cover process management including 30 pages on deadlocks.
    130 pages on storage management: memory, virtual memory, secondary
    storage.  70 pages on file systems and protection.  Then 100 pages
    on distributed systems.  The last part of the book has case
    studies on Unix and Mach: 50 pages on Unix and 30 pages on Mach.
    The last chapter gives a short 10 page historical perspective.

  Mail a message with contents `send help' to <os4e@aw.com> for
  further details of the new edition.  The book gives a good (but
  slightly theoretical) overview of operating system concepts.  A good
  complement would be the books covering Minix or BSD, which are more
  implementation-oriented.

- `Operating Systems', Harvey Deitel, Addison-Wesley, 1990, ISBN
  0-201-18038-3.  Not a bad book; gives the same sort of theoretical
  treatment of operating systems as the dinosaur book.  Includes case
  studies on Unix, MS DOS, MVS, VM, the Macintosh OS, and OS/2.

- `An Operating Systems Vade Mecum', second edition, by Raphael
  Finkel, 1988, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-637950-8.  I really like this
  book; it is a bit more theoretical than the dinosaur book, but is
  well-written and clear.  I would accompany it with labs based on one
  of the educational experimental OS's (NachOS, OSP) for hands-on
  experience.

  The edition mentioned above is now out of print.  However, it may be
  obtained via anonymous ftp from
  <URL:ftp://ftp.ms.uky.edu/pub/tech-reports/UK/cs/>.
  Here is the associated chunk of README:

    This textbook is out of print.  It was published by Prentice Hall.
    The author now owns the copyright.  Permission is granted to copy
    this text for any noncommercial purpose.  Feel free to generate
    copies of the text for your students.  You may also photocopy the
    original book without restriction.  Kindly send suggested upgrades
    to the author: <raphael@ms.uky.edu>.  He is planning a new
    edition sometime.

  [It's been a few years since I've looked at this book, so I can't
   remember what it contains.  Can anyone help?]

- `The Logical Design of Operating Systems', second edition, Lubomir
  Bic, Alan Shaw, 1988, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-540139-9.  This one
  isn't as theoretical as Finkel's book, nor is it as long as the
  dinosaur book.  I haven't tried to use it in a course yet, but it
  looks like a fairly well-rounded text.

  [Can anyone write a paragraph on the various topics covered ... ?]

- `Operating Systems', second edition, William Stallings
  <ws@shore.net>, Prentice-Hall, 1995, ISBN 0-02-415493-8.  I
  received very positive feedback from students about the first
  edition of this book; I have not yet seen the second edition.  The
  explanations of topics were easy to understand and complete.  An
  especially nice feature was that at the end of each chapter OS/2,
  Unix and MVS were used to demonstrate real life implementations of
  the theory talked about.  I found this tying together of theory and
  practice much nicer than having the practice lumped at the end of
  the book.

- `Modern Operating Systems,' Andrew Tanenbaum <ast@cs.vu.nl>,
  1992, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-588187-0.  This started out as a
  rewrite of the Minix book, but he pulled the Minix-specific material
  and added seven chapters on distributed systems.  It's a bit heavy
  for undergrads, depending on how far into the distributed systems
  you go, but I like Tanenbaum as an author.  He'll be bringing out a
  second edition of the Minix book sometime soon; as he says, one is
  for `hands-on' (Minix) and one is for `hands-off' (Modern OS).

  The book is divided into two parts: `traditional' introductory
  material, taken more or less verbatim from the Minix book, and an
  introduction to distributed systems.  Each parts concludes with a
  case study and comparison of two well-known systems (Unix and
  MS-DOS, and Mach and Amoeba).  The bibliography at the end is
  organised well for more advanced coverage of the topics encountered
  throughout the book.

  Topics covered in the first part include process concepts, memory
  management, file system organisation and I/O, and deadlock detection
  and avoidance.  The second part addresses issues such as distributed
  communication, synchronisation (the section on clock synchronisation
  is well put together), processes in distributed environments
  (nothing on process migration), and distributed file systems (using
  AFS as an example).  The second part seems more suitable for
  advanced undergraduate level or introductory graduate level studies.

  This book has been translated into German; it is available from
  Carl Hanser Verlag as `Moderne Betriebssysteme', ISBN 3-446-17472-9.

- `Operating System Design: the Xinu Approach', Douglas Comer, Timothy
  Fossum, 1984, Prentice Hall, ISBNs 0-13-638180-4 (PC edition) and
  0-13-638529-X (Macintosh edition).  A walk-through of the principles
  behind, and implementation of, the Xinu operating system, a small
  instructional OS similar to Unix.  While this text is aging
  somewhat, it presents its material in a clear fashion, and does a
  good job of covering the "standard" fundamentals of operating
  systems.

- `Operating Systems: Design and Implementation', Andrew S. Tanenbaum,
  1986 (?), Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-637406-9.  This, along with
  Comer's Xinu books, is the classic text which `teaches by doing',
  covering the design and implementation of Minix, a microkernel
  operating system which has a programming and user interface similar
  to Unix.  As with Comer's books, this text is showing its age
  somewhat (the source is very much out of date with the current Minix
  distribution), but it still does a good job of presenting the basics
  of operating system implementation.

- `Operating Systems Programming: The SR Programming Language',
  Stephen J. Hartley <shartley@mcs.drexel.edu>, Oxford University
  Press, 1995, ISBN 0-19-5095790.  SR is a language for concurrent
  programming; this book presents the language, presents some example
  programs in the context of operating systems or concurrent
  programming, and provides exercises in the form of Open Student
  Laboratories.  The book is designed to be used in conjunction with
  one of the standard operating systems texts to provide concurrent
  programming experience, or can be used alone as an introductory
  concurrent programming book.  I have not seen a copy of it yet, and
  so cannot comment on its quality.  The example programs in the book
  are intended for running in a Unix environment; they are available
  via anonymous ftp from <URL:ftp://mcs.drexel.edu/pub/>, and
  the SR language itself is available from
  <URL:ftp://cs.arizona.edu/>.