The Magic Garden Explained: The Internals of Unix System V Release 4: An Open Systems Design

Rating:
Summary: The definitive guide for UNIX kernel developer
Review: The Magic Garden is so far the most comprehensive and in-depth discussion on the Unix Sys-V kernel. It discusses in-depth on how the new design of virtual memory works, in conjunction with the file system module. The authors include a lot of short source code pieces to illustrate the concept and present explanation in clear and concise language.

Rating:
Summary: The Magic of UNIX is completely explained
Review: This seems to be the worst book about the Unix internals I ever read. The signal/noise ratio of this book is quite low. Most of its contents are just slightly commented sVr4 header files (which files by the way you can get for free with a free UnixWare system and not bother about a book). The descriptions of algorighms are short, difficult to follow and sometimes self-contradicting. And between the high-level descriptions of algorithms and low-level header files there is a great gap that makes both these descriptions rather useless. If you look for the description of what's going on inside svr4 then compared to this book the Vahalia's book covers much wider range of systems (including sVr4 and its derivative Solaris), each of them in more detail, has much clearer descriptions, and all that in less volume. But if all you want are slightly commented header files then this book is exactly what you are looking for.

Rating:
Summary: Does more confusion than explaining
Review: This seems to be the worst book about the Unix internals I ever read. The signal/noise ratio of this book is quite low. Most of its contents are just slightly commented sVr4 header files (which files by the way you can get for free with a free UnixWare system and not bother about a book). The descriptions of algorighms are short, difficult to follow and sometimes self-contradicting. And between the high-level descriptions of algorithms and low-level header files there is a great gap that makes both these descriptions rather useless. If you look for the description of what's going on inside svr4 then compared to this book the Vahalia's book covers much wider range of systems (including sVr4 and its derivative Solaris), each of them in more detail, has much clearer descriptions, and all that in less volume. But if all you want are slightly commented header files then this book is exactly what you are looking for.