Rating: 
Summary: Very boring, DRY, too much stuff to read all pointless
Review: Beginners book: Yes
Recommended beginners book: NOI had to read this book for a course and after passing this class on OS, I go to systems programming and I dont know what a process image on Unix is, which is a very simple thing that this book fails to deliver. This has been written with the intent of being as the 1st book on OS, then it should deal with two things embedded OS and computer OS in a general manner. There is no RTOS here. So, there are only two things to teach on computer OS: Windows and Unix. Why talk about Sloaris and Linux and Unix and what not, a simple discussion on Sun solaris is good, it covers too much, there are absolutely no programming assignments on OS. This book might be ok for IT people, but if u r going to be a programmer or a system guy, stay away from it. I was so so disappointed after reading this book (whatever I could). The memory management section is so pathetic. Most of the things that this book tells us, we already know, that is the kind of abstract matter there is in it. It is funny that this book got some sort of award.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent for an OS course textbook
Review: I adopted the book for my COMP279 Operating System course. The book is up-to-date, illustrating the current technology with real examples. Textbook especially explains the thread concept very clearly as no other textbooks do. Together with multiprocessor scheduling chapter, the book is essential textbook for every OS course.
Rating:
Summary: Informative with good real world examples
Review: I am currently using this book as the text for my CMPB214 Operating Systems course at Universiti Tenaga Nasional, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I picked the book after comparing it with other OS text books by other authors. Good overview and discussions of various issues in Operating Systems design with current OS examples.
Rating: 
Summary: good at times, but seemingly pointless at other times
Review: I am giving this book 3 stars because it's of mixed quality. Whenever there's a obvious problem that needs to be solved, as in the case of handling RAID, concurrency, replacement of memory blocks, etc., the book is a decent one with only a few rough edges. My problem with the book is that a lot of times, what the author is trying to accomplish isn't clear to me, and I just keep asking "so what" but the book of course doesn't talk back. I hope a few examples will illustrate my point: at one point in the book, the author gave a list of reasons why a process would stop; a process stops because it's done, or the user stops it, or it did something illegal - and why is that important? Besides, I thought every computer user knows stuff like that... To put it another way, I feel the author in general spent way too much time describing things and defining things, things that are set in stone but are mostly irrelavent because you really want to study the things that you can change - you want to be where all the "issues" are at; For me, reasons for ending a process are set in stone - all OS will end a process for basically the same reason his definitions are especially annoying - the author use a lot of jargons when it's not really called for; what's worse is the stupidity of some of it - on the chapter about security, he "defined" everyday words like "secret" - without saying how "secret" differs in computer science from the "secret" in real life - to me a secret is the same in computer science as in real life; I admit there are hard parts to the book, but some of the book is rediculously dumb and seem totally out of place; example: the author tried to "define" the floppy drive... zz... zz... It's only a sentence or two, but in the mist of everything it's just really dumb - I am clueless as to how this author decides what to put into the book and what to exclude and one time he modified two lines of a program - but didn't say which; well, the program is short but at that stage, the pseudo code "signal( )" and "wait( )" is new to the reader so finding the modification is uncomfortable for me at least - he could have easily put those 2 modified lines in bold and he didn't and I think he resorted to math way too often ; math should be employed only if good old intuition fails I can go on and on, but to avoid being too long winded and wasting your time, my feeling is that this book has a lot of info but also a lot of rough edges and garbage (as in pointless writing). Also, he goes way too fast with the minor topics. The sections on NT, Solaris, Unix, queuing analysis, etc. all look more like summaries when they are suppose to be intros.
Rating:
Summary: Buy your text books from AMAZON!!!!!!!!!!!
Review: I bought this book for my class. Since is is a text book, whatever is inside didn't matter to me. Easy to read though...
But the price and the service from AMAZON was amazing.
Don't buy your text books from campus book stores ever again.
They are the ripper-offers.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent book for both beginners and gurus
Review: I have not seen the like of this book. It was used as the text for an operating system course I took last winter. It covers all you need to know about operating system concepts. The numerous examples included couldn't have been explained in any better way. The approach from the first page to the last page makes you to always want to read more. It was so written in an interesting manner that you can never read a chapter in half. The references are very informative and provide links to other sources of valuable information. The book includes a good comparison of certain concepts in Windows and Unix Operating systems. The questions at the end of each chapter were tough though, with little or no hints, but nonetheless I will greatly recommend it for anybody taking any class in operating systems.
Rating: 
Summary: Improving, but not really a classic
Review: I have taught operating systems at the graduate level for the last 5 years. In other areas of computer science, I've been spoiled by classic textbooks (e.g. Aho, Sethi and Ullman's "Compilers: Principles Designs and Tools", aka "The Dragon Book" for compiler design, Hennessy and Patterson's "Computer Architecture a Quantitative Approach", etc.) Computer Operating systems is a mature field, yet no textbook reaches classic stature in Operating Systems. Previous editions of the textbook have had serious errata in the problem sets (it i embarrassing to assign unsolvable problems to students) I no longer use any problems from this book as a result. However, among Operating Systems textbooks, there are primarily 2 categories, those with example code (e.g. Tannenbaums) and survey books. This is a survey book (sometimes called theoretical, but not in the Automata Theory or Algorithms sense). It has some overview of design principles and some analysis, which makes it better than the others I've seen, but still leaves a bit to be desired, I feel it is still a bit too qualitative. I'd like to see more back of the envelope analysis (like say Patterson and Hennessy's book). The section on scheduling is pretty good, with some nice analysis, and the queueing theory section is useful for first year grads and upper division undergrads. Still, I need to assign quite a bit of additional literature.
Rating:
Summary: Truly Excellent Book!
Review: I just finished grad school in Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I borrowed this book from my Professor and after reading it for a while I am now buying it to use as a reference on the job. I can state quite confidently that it is one of the best OS books I have read. I strongly recommend this book for university coursework, particularly at the undergraduate level.
Rating:
Summary: Unconvential, yet very useful
Review: I liked this book's organization. I have also Tanenbaum's and Silberschatz's; what I concluded it's that this book, even if sometime appeared to be a bit ... compacted on some "traditional" issues (if I can judge them this way on the basis of the other two books, but processes' statuses are covered here better than anywhere else), it has given space to some other very interesting ones, starting from Security, and going on with SMP topics.
I particularly enjoyed the view it adopted even on common topics. E.g. the emphasis it gave to subtleties like distinguish the nature of the four requirements for deadlocks, the classification of various policies and mechanism (in a astonishingly efficient way) for topics like scheduling, paged memory issues or the importance of interrupts as The tool for modern techniques and achievements.
And ... the chapter on security has been a lifesave for me on the last days of the course.
Keep this book near to Tanenbaum's second edition of "Modern Operatin System" if you can, and you'll have plenty of good material for a typical OS course.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent fundamentals of operating systems text.
Review: I read this text in an Operating Systems class at the University of Phoenix. I liked the "bad" examples which were faulted by another reviewer, just as much as I liked the "good" examples. The "bad" examples show different approaches to solving the same problem, while showing the difficulty one might encounter while attempting to solve the problem that way. My conclusion: if you are interested in the "bottom line" or "right answer," this book contains a lot of extraneous information. If you are interested in the hows and whys of current practice, this book is probably for you.
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