Rating: 
Summary: a very confusing book
Review: This book is OK for its first few pages of each chapter, i.e. the intro part, you (an undergraduate ) can use to get a brief understanding of some basic concepts, but if you want to really understand something thouroughly, this is a very bad book, for example, the proof of the mutual exclusion algorithms in Chapter 7 is very clumsy and confusing, it's actually easier to look at the code and reason yourself.
for most of the deeper reasoning about the alorithms in the book, it's much better to read the original papers.
some of the sentences in Chapter 7 seem to be copied without much effor by the author from original papers.
probably the 3 reasons you can use this book is
(1) the simple intro part
(2) the code in the book is simplified and probably uses more meaningful mnemonics than those in original paper ( not exactly, for some, it's even more weird !!)
(3) use it as a bibliography to the papers, which , you really should read for understanding
Rating: 
Summary: XP Update not worth it!
Review: This is the only textbook we used for our OS class at university. My interests lie in systems programming and some low-level interfacing using high level languages but this book really didn't help me much. I was looking forward to this subject but disappointed because the lecturer basically took this book as the bible and made no references to other sources. If this book was to create a religion and my lecturer was the pope then I wouldn't be surprised if there were so many factions like in Christianity...because of the confusing presentation of the subject. Half of the time I was consulting Google because of the nearly useless examples in the book. At one point I was arguing about a vaguely explained topic with my lecturer. I was using other texts as my references but unfortunately my lecturer was pushing his own interpretation of the topic.
Rating:
Summary: Lots of stuff covered unclearly
Review: This book is excellent in terms of the range of content it covers. However, the writing is often unclear and disorganized. Worse, for a university class setting, many of the exercises are near useless because they are very vague and leave you unsure what sort of answer they are looking for.
Rating: 
Summary: Of all the computer related books this one takes the cake...
Review: Being a 3rd year comp sci major this is by far one of the hardest books to read. Not saying that because of its technicality but because the examples and explanations inside the book are extremely vague and abstract. Subjects tend skip here and there, worst of all statements lack clear cut examples, and remain muddy. In the worst cases, distinct subjects seperated in paragraphs bleed from one paragraph to another which is extremely frustrating to read and understand. It seems as if the authors used a cut and paste and mistakenly pasted one paragraph into another. Ultimately, I found myself taking a black marker and crossing out irrelevant sentences, and there is a lot of them.Unfortunately My school uses this book so I do not have much of a choice whether I want it or not. I would not recommend this book as a source of learning this subject if you have a choice on this matter.
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