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The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System

The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System

List Price: $64.99
Your Price: $53.91
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Very good book but too theoretical
Review: The book is good, no doubt about it. And it covers a big gap in the Unix world. It helped me numerous times to understand how things work in the kernel of FreeBSD. But, and there is a big but here, the book does not contain even a single line of code. Strange for a book that is supposed to describe a kernel. There are a few instances of pseudo-code here and there but nothing more. The book gives you the big picture, describes the various parts of the kernel like virtual memory, scheduling, filesystems but it is too descriptive in my opinion. I would like to see instead of long descriptions some real kernel code. Ofcourse you may argue that you can find all the source code in the world in FreeBSD, but thats different. Its not a book for beginners, you should already have read some other Operating System book first before you dig in this one as the authors themselves agree. Bottomline: good book but too theoretical for my taste. I recommend it only to the serious reader. Its not a bed time book. You need to work your brain to make the connection.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: What a wonderful book.
Review: This book is perfect. During the past summer I began to learn about UNIX filesystems and this book came in handy. It explains what a vnode is in a easy to understand way. The explanations on the VFS API is great too. Now that MacOSX has a BSD 4.4 foundation this book will be good to have for macintosh developers.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Not bad.
Review: This really filled the void between the amazing hands-on "Lions Book" and Maurice Bach's "The Design of the UNIX Operating System", introducing the reader to some more modern implementation of the UNIX operating system.
There is some bad in the good though, the text varies in quality, not having code anywhere in the book is sometimes a big miss, you can get pretty exhausted reading this, I meant to get this book as bed time reading, it ended up being more of a reference, with only a few chapters being useful, if you're curious about the internals of the actual system get it, but if you need some more theoretical grasp or a "toy problem" book to truly understand the basics, then get Lions book.
Conclusion, I dont regret having it on my shelf, maybe it just could have been better.

Enjoy.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: very good, nice, funny, professional kernel hacking
Review: well, just see the authors,..
in my opinion, the overall text is very good designed, easy to read, and gives you a good overview of the kernel.
although im not a professional kernel hacking, it explains you how the system works, lettign you "grep" through the source, (get 4.3 bsd from ftp://ftp.funet.fi/unix first), very good.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great book on BSD 4.4, but make sure you've read Bach first
Review: While this book has been written by some of the best in the UNIX arena, their strong focus on packing a lot of content into these pages at times can prove a burden to the reader.

Reading through the chapters, it appears that the book could have been rendered more readable if a knowledgeable technical editor had put the finishing touches on it.

Nevertheless, even though it takes a bit of time to get used to the different writing styles and differences in quality of several chapters, this books is a well of insights into the internal workings of BSD 4.4 and its derivatives (like Mac OS X).

In order to gain the most from this title, I strongly urge interested readers to already have worked their way through Maurice J. Bach's "The Design of the UNIX Operating System".


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