Rating: 
Summary: Nice real-life examples, but badly organized and written
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Very good
Review: I didn't read any other book on operating systems. But I think this is one is very worth reading. (This is also a test to see if Amazon.com will post this message for me!)
Rating: 
Summary: Outdated. Some chapters are poorly organized
Review: This is the fifth edition. The first one was in 1991 and patches are visible in the text. The age of the book is now evident and a lot of content is outdated. It looks like the text need complete rewriting, not patches. I suspect many students probably will hate the course and all OSes after using it :-).Chapters 1-3 are not impressive. Chapters 10-17 are weak. Moreover they are very poorly organized. IMHO only chapters 4-9 and 21-22 can be considered decent, but even for them a dynosource mascot at the beginning of each chapter is a relevant warning :-) The content is mainly text with very few programs, so the book can be classifyed as "theory-based approach" book (compare with "example-based approach") but coverage of related algorithms is not impressive and selection can be better. Coverage of Linux is better in the latest edition-- Ch.22 is very good, one of the best in the book. It was derived from unpublished manuscript by Stephen Tweedie. The book also contain one (superficial and uncritical) chapter on NT. The first author write books mainly about database systems (see Database System Concepts -- also in many editions). The second author had written only one additional book -- Using UNIX With CDROM.
Rating: 
Summary: GREAT!
Review: Wow!! I borrowed a copy from a friend thinking I would look at a few concepts.... couldnt put the book down, I had to get my own copy.
Rating:
Summary: few concepts confusing but overall excellent!!
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A must-read for any computer systems developer
Review: The organization of the book (the latest 3rd edition has had a lot of re-organization from its earlier ones) is very comprehensive, and the pace of the book seems very good. It unravels the internals of an OS in a very interesting manner, and gives insights into OS design also. It keeps "small talk" to a minimum and gives good enlightening analogies to difficult concepts. The chapter on the comparison of various OSes will surely be very useful for all OS designers and developers.
Rating:
Summary: XP Update not worth it!
Review: Almost bought this in the store until I noticed there were case studies for both Win2K and WinXP. These are very similar operating systems and, sure enough, the text for the chapters is exactly the same for most of these two chapters. I do not understand why interesting operating systems [FreeBSD, Mach] were left online in order that these two redundant chapters could be printed. Were it not for my familiarity with previous editions, I would assume the authors knew very little about OS concepts if they thought that covering 2K and XP would provide two distinct case studies for comparison. In short, the 2K coverage should have been replaced by one of the online chapters.
Rating:
Summary: Great Fundamentals of OS Book
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Mediocre to poor OS book
Review: It's been around 13 years since I took a course on OSes. I decided to purchase this book as a reference and to review some of the material that I have not had to deal with for a long time (e.g. synchronization primitives). I found the book to be a poor reference and found the chapters that I read to have poor or lacking exposition of the principles, data structures, and algorithms involved. e.g. there were sections where he lists pseudocode and says "see fig 2.13 for the algorithm" with no discussion of the reasoning behind the algorithm. The book also did not take any time to discuss practical considerations, e.g. implementing synchronization primitives with modern optimizing compilers and on modern out-of-order memory systems.
I am looking for a better substitute, and for now would suggest passing on this book.
Rating:
Summary: A must read OS book
Review: Well, IT'S A MUST READ FOR CS PEOPLE! It explaines the concepts of modern OS very well. It's not a book teaching you how to code your Mini-OS for the course assignment, but you will learn lots of fundamental OS components at a higher level abstraction: Memory Management, Process vs. Thread, File Systems, etc. There are lots of other books talking about OS implementation, this is not the one focus on specific details of implementation.
I've read this book several times in fact, everytime I figure out sth. new and learn more. I enjoy reading this book. Don't expect go through it in couple of days, and say "I know OS now", it's not gonna happen.
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