Operating Systems, Third Edition

Rating:
Summary: overwrought and underdone
Review: a weak attempt at an introductory text...in trying to simplify the subject too much meat has been pared from the bones...the result is a sometimes confusing and often plainly erroneous text...spend the extra seven bucks and get either stallings or tanenbaum...if you buy this book I hope it is for a wedding gift to a couple you do not like...

Rating:
Summary: uninformative and incoherent
Review: Gary Nutt is incapable of writing. He is verbose and repetitive and spends a lot of time on pointless topics, such as notation for sets. Like so many mediocre authors, he fills the text with pseudo-mathematical notation to make it seem more sophisticated. The typesetting is deplorable, and I recommend he learn LaTeX.

Nutt assumes the reader is a complete idiot. The book is an overview of the concepts of operating systems, which aren't remotely sophisticated. You will not learn anything practical about Operating Systems, and the concepts he covers are so trivial that you could learn in all in a day (once you extract them from the hundreds of pages or jargon and silly diagrams).

I recommend "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation" by Andrew Tanenbaum and Al Woodhull instead of this trash.

Rating:
Summary: Deadlocked in CONFUSION
Review: Gary Nutt's book is the most confusing approach to Operating Systems I have ever encountered. His constant and confusing mathematical definitions make the simplest topics so confusing, that Einstein or Dijkstra would throw in the towel before understanding them. I am a third year Computer Science student and I have never used a textbook this horrible. If you are a professor, PLEASE consider another textbook for your students! (That is if you want them to learn something other then how to waste money on horrible unedited textbooks)

Rating:
Summary: Reading this book does more harm than good.
Review: I am using this book because i'm taking the ugrad OS course at CU Boulder. Guess what university the author is from. yeah, that's right. This is, quite possibly, one of the worst books ever written by a human being. If, hypothetically, one were to forgive the book for blatantly incorrect examples that obviously haven't even been checked or reviewed and have spawned more than a few bewildered discussions among my fellow students and I, for rediculous project suggestions, for its condescending tone, for the obnoxious little graphics and second-rate dull grey paper on which they're printed, it still remains that the book does an atrocious job of treating the history and current practice of operating systems. It seems to be leaving us with a horribly skewed general prospective on the field and a paucity of actual knowledge--thus, not only are we ill-prepared to design an operating system, but we are worse programmers for having adopted Nutt's sick and deviant way of thinking. If this seems too vague for you, let me simply say that more than a few vague, general discussions are clearly based not on UNIX, not even on NT, but on MS-DOS. The fact that i recognize the lineage of his thinking is a major source of embarrassment for me, but I must share it with you lest this book corrupt yet more fresh young minds. Those who enjoy kneeling and worshiping before mistakes IBM made twenty years ago will get a real kick out of this book--there are detailed discussions of bizzare things IBM did on old two-ton mainframes, extensive discussions of batch job scheduling and seek algorithms for ten-inch disk packs. Yet, for the rest of us, I can only say: if you have a copy of this book, I advise you to burn it immediately. I sure wish I could. If i can save just one poor soul from this book, I will die a happy man.

Rating:
Summary: good book to see an idea & then how it's done
Review: I like that this book has examples (Unix/Linux and Windows) right next to the concept that it is covering. None of the other os books have this- I think it makes a big difference when you are a student and don't know this material at all! I think some other reviews are talking about an older edition of this book. the one I just bought has great examples ...

Rating:
Summary: Words cannot express how much I hate this book
Review: I only bought this book because it was required for my Operating Systems Design course. I find the book very difficult to follow and comprehend. The chapter exercises are frustrating because the answers to the questions are rarely in the chapter text! I know I speak for every one of my classmates when I say this is a poor textbook. If you are a professor and are reading this, PLEASE do not use this book. Find another one!

Rating:
Summary: Yes, this REALLY IS the WORST CS BOOK EVER
Review: I usually try not to review something that several people have had the same comments about it that I have, but this book is so terrible that I feel I must help to emphasize that fact. If you're ever assigned this book in your college OS class, either drop the class immediately or ask the professor to reconsider (then drop the class). This book has absolutely no valuable information in it what-so-ever. As a matter of fact, it barely has any information in it at all. The problems and lab assignments are the most confusing ones I have ever seen. The instructions have absolutely no logic and sometimes contradict themselves. The code that is supposed to help is often completely wrong. The questions at the end of the chapters generally have little to do with the material--or lack there of--contained in the chapter (or elsewhere in the book, for that matter). Also, most of the labs that say "this is to be done in operating system x" usually cannot be done in that operating system. Additionally, different versions of operating systems (other than Windows, which apparently can be broken down into NT and non-NT anyway) don't exist--Linux is UNIX is Solaris is BSD. Perhaps if the author spent less time writing jokes and more time writing something useful this book might be worth half its weight in salt. I can't believe this sort of doorstop could ever be published by such a prestegious company as Addison-Wesley.

Rating:
Summary: One of the worst books ever
Review: I'm a systems researcher myself. I can't believe this book is allowed to be in publication. The writing is shoddy, and the relevancy of the material is fragmented. The poor quality is perfectly encapsulated by the two luminaries praising the book on the back cover. One is from Centre College, some liberal arts college I had never heard of; the other is supposedly a professor from the University of California, but upon closer investigation, he's only a staff member, not a real professor. This book has a second-hand feel to it throughout. If you're a student forced to use this book in college, I suggest you change colleges.

Rating:
Summary: The worst book ever
Review: I've been forced to buy this book and unfortunately using it for a month. The chapters are totaly inconprehensible, the information is scatered all over the book. He starts a subject, skip to another and get back to it a few chapters later. The problem sets are bogus. They ask about things that are not in the chapter and you can spend hours trying to figure out what he wants, just to find out after a few week that the answer is five chapter s later. The diagrams don't make sens whatsoever, some of them have so many lines you mistake them for abstract paintings. Don't try to use the code from the book, as it crashes all the time. Instead use the updates from Nutt's page, that also crash. The bottom line is : don't buy the book if you don't have to, and if you must, just copy the problem sets, because reading the book won't help you solve them. I would give this book 0 stars, but unfortunately it is not allowed.

Rating:
Summary: Could have been better
Review: Like the title says, this could have been better. No doubt it's difficult to write a "modern" book on operating systems in such a tumultuous area. There were blatant errors, especially in examples, and it seemed like the "In The Hangar" sections were the most relevant parts of the book. However, coupled with the "Kernel Projects for Linux" book, it is much better. If you need it for a class, you have no choice. Otherwise I'd check out books by Tanenbaum or the "dinosaur" OS books.