Design of the UNIX Operating System (Prentice Hall Software Series)

Ever wanted to know just how UNIX works and what its doing when you use it? Ever wanted to know a bit more about the people and the evolution of UNIX? If so, this is the book for you. Although somewhat aged now, it still contains enough factual and apropriate material for any undergraduate or postgraduate Degree study of UNIX. In fact I would rate this book as the most important in my Computer Science degree - and it certainly didnt let me down! The book starts with a look at the more basic aspects of the OS, its history and how it appears to traditional users. Then the book moves deeply into the internal fundamentals of how it works by examining the file system structure, memory addressing, scheduling algorithms (it even lists snippets of the source code!), security etc. It then winds up with some basics on distrubuited systems. Although it lacks information on things such as nfs, nis, PAM etc it is arguable that these are services added onto a core UNIX environment and consequently not really apropriate for this book. Modern changes to kernels such as modular UNIX however are not covered as a result of its age. Any decent system administration book would cover off these extra topics and maybe one day we can persuade Maurice to update his excellent work.

I'm re-reading this classic UNIX text for the first time in 10 years. Not an easy read by any means, and let down slightly by the lack of solutions to the exercises at the end of each chapter.Nevertheless, if you need to know the how and why of System V UNIX, this is the place to start. It provides an excellent intoduction to the UNIX kernel and paves the way to exploring the Linux kernel in more recent texts such as "Understanding the Linux Kernel" from O'Reilly.

The author has used really very complex language...the book is good for postgraduaion courses only as here we r learning it in our B.E (B.S. of US UK) in India..its hard to grasp the things..hav to read at least thrice to understand the meaning properly...authour could have made the book little easier to understand by usin a better format with big font printing...in our second year most of the students hav to study the book of operating system by tanenbaum first to understand maurice j bach...so its like we r using this book only for exam purpose .... stilll i ll giv 3 stars to this book as after reading it thrice and not for exam oriented purpose ur knowlege really gets doubled about operating system...

Alot has been said about this book - most of it true and very positive. So I'll just add my experience...In self-studying OS (they didn't directly cover it in college), I tried a few other popular OS books. Modern operating systems (T-rex book), the book with the tiger on it (forgot its name). I bought a book on Windows...I never completed them, and never began feeling like I had gotten to the root of what makes an operating system an operating system.It became clear I needed to study UNIX first, and then branch out to other modern OS's from there. But what I really needed... was to study the UNIX kernel first, and become a proficient user next.Core understanding is always something I look for first when learning. It's just the style inwhich I learn... some are different, they like to dive in and get their hands dirty. I like to start at the root, get the details about the fundamentals in place, and work my way up.This book is perfect for that. If you're that kind of learner... this is your starting point to OS, in my opinion. The core structure of an OS could not be made more clear here, and you get the historical grounding on UNIX as well which is valuable perspective.I don't mean to imply the book is elementary in its content - not at all. It's not a beginners book, it's quite technical and very well written too. And I think experienced developers who have familiarity of OS concepts, but haven't studied the UNIX kernal, will benefit from this book.Overall... an easy 5 stars.

Best outdated book I ever read.

Great book by great people.

as advertised

Very thorough, goes into just the right level of detail to give you a fundamental understanding and appreciation of everything that goes into operating system design.