Rating: 
Summary: No a good book
Review: It is not a book that overview OS, but a book for people who would like to read source code. It is overloaded with details. I don't consider the book is for beginners.
Rating: 
Summary: Alright.
Review: It's a pretty good book. Nice to sit down sometimes and read. It didn't give me quite enough structure, or a good grasp of how big of a task some things are. It just said "we have functions to do this, here's what this is, and the functions are in listins 97328947 and 823762786437826". Could have answered more "why"s and "how"s
Rating: 
Summary: Great Book. Period.
Review: Outstanding book. See All synonyms for "Great". MINIX makes this book unique learning experience. Let us not forget MINIX was the source of inspiration for LINUX and many porions of MINIX can be found in LINUX.
Rating: 
Summary: Overrated
Review: The authors of this text assume too much. This pretty much sums up the entirety of the work, which is too technical to make a good introductory text and too simple to make a good advanced discussion of operating systems.First off, you need a very strong understanding of the C programming language to get anything out of this book. The length of the text is deceiving- almost half of it is actually printed source code of the MINIX operating system. What the other half of the book does is, essentially, wade through said source code. If you don't know C well, you're not going anywhere with this. I suggest buying 'The C Programming Language' (Prentice Hall: Kernighan, Ritchie) and 'Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment' (Addison Wesley: Stevens) if you don't already own them. While the authors do go into some discussion about how the various parts of an operating system work, they don't go into any of the actual details. Why? Because MINIX simply doesn't DO a lot of these things (e.g. deadlock prevention, swapping or paging, advanced scheduling). If you're actually thinking of writing your own OS, you'll only get a general idea of what needs to be done, nothing more. The theory is covered quite well, but if you're looking for what this book advertises on the cover ('Design and Implementation') you will probably be disappointed. There are some advantages to this text. I would have given it a higher rating, but I think the current one is deceptive. For one, if you're familiar with UNIX or Linux, MINIX is very similar. It's also a lot simpler and shorter code-wise, so it doesn't take a guru to modify the source. Also, like Linux, it isn't copyrighted. The system itself works well and is very educational. The book's resources are also well done, with an included CD that has all the source and comprehensive instructions on how to install it (be sure you backup first!). MINIX is also very well commented and, if you know C, is quite easy to understand. Further, non-material problems with the text include a discussion that seems to jump from one place to another and doesn't make good use of diagrams. You'll often find a very useful diagram in the book... except that it's about three chapters ahead of where it really would have been enlightening. Key terms are in bold, but aren't summarized anywhere else in the book, oftentimes including the index! This can make it annoying to look up something you can't remember. Additionally, the numerous references to the MINIX source code simply refer to line numbers. Some might not mind this, but I personally found it frustrating to have to keep flipping back and forth between one half of the book and the other. It would have helped if the authors had just put the relevant source where it's discussed and left out the entire listing in the back. It's available on the CD and online anyway, if you need to look at all of it. In summary, Operating Systems 2nd Ed. is very average in quality as a textbook, both for beginners and gurus. The MINIX operating system is well planned and designed, but the book itself offsets this quality with its flaws.
Rating:
Summary: Average book on OS
Review: The book focus on Operating Systems and includes source code of a mini OS called Minix. Till I read it, I always read rave reviews, but found it to be quite over rated. The pros of the book includes the source for reference, a Micro kernel OS design, while what is not really upto the mark is the language tends to be difficult thereby making a tough subject even more tougher, the author's view tends to spill over and are juvenile with cliches like all students are trying to hack systems, etc and does not cover various aspects of OS subsystems. My recomendation would be the book by Abraham Silberschatz, Peter Baer Galvin called "Operating System Concepts" incase of you are starting off or just want a very easy to read book or consider various approaches.
Rating:
Summary: Historically Significant, Simply Complex
Review: The operating system for this book, Minix, is the ancestor to the now wildly popular linux. The idea behind this book is incredible, step through some of the most important areas of Operating Systems using an open source OS which was intentionally kept very simple. Rather than a survey of all the capabilities of operating systems which we see in many other books, this book focuses in on five of the core concepts. It discusses design tradeoffs involved in selecting an implementation for any one area of an operating system and is a very respectable book from the man who wrote the Operating System in question. A Good book if you are interested in the deeper concepts of OS.
Rating:
Summary: Reading for the self-educated
Review: This book is good, rather good if you are interested in a good mix of theory and implementation. I'm self taught in this area, and still yet to go to college. I think my background provides me with a disadvantage as I tend to lack good guidance, however this book tends to compensate for this. I really feel this book is superior to others beacuse it tends to be a self-contained work, making it much easier to understand without instuction(for example it is the only book on operating systems theory I know of which provides hardware/implemention related interupt information). In short I would highly recomend this book to any future linux/bsd kernel hacker.
Rating: 
Summary: it's not a novel, Dr. Tanenbaum
Review: This book--I loved and hated it. Dr. Tanenbaum writes beautifully, but technical books are not novels. It required painstaking reading and rereading to transform his endless paragraphs into concise summaries that were suitable for test preparation. I appreciated the overall layout in that the first halves of chapters 2-5 were devoted to generalities, while the second halves dealt with MINIX specifics. I never touched the 400+ pages of code--I didn't bother as I find grepping to be much easier. The code itself is very pretty and easy to read. I found his tone to be more than a little defensive regarding his choice of a process-structured system vs UNIX's monolithic system, especially in his snippy "(in UNIX) when a system call is made, the operating system switches from the user-space part to the kernel-space part in a somewhat *magical* way." He did go on and on about terminals; most instructors are probably not nearly as interested in the details of terminals as Tanenbaum thinks. Most telling was the cattiness of his remark about the dinosaurs on the cover of his competitors' book. I am not sure that I would like to have Dr. Tanenbaum for a friend. I have a copy of the Silberschatz text, also. Both of these texts are good, but for different reasons. Neither is the operating systems book of my dreams.
Rating:
Summary: The book with real source codes in it
Review: This is a good book to begin with on the subject of operating systems. I always wanted to look at an operating systems source code upclose, with a good explanation of whats going on, and this book has around 30,000 lines of it with comments. I hope the authors will come out with another book on the the init process and a few other services. I had a couple of laughs reading the book.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book and Source Code Complete Introduction to OS
Review: This is another of Tannenbaums great books. It is delightful to read his books. It deepens your understanding and gives you a feeling of happiness at the same time.
Specifically this book contains the entire source code of an OS (Minix THE predecessor of LINUX). It is complete and thoroughly explained. The source code is in C and sometimes in Assembler. Especially the Assembler parts are hard to grasp. The C code is sometimes very lucid sometimes I simply got lost. So I just stuck to the main text.
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