ISBN0131479547

I always end up writing these reviews with some trepidation... Am I out to convince people to buy stuff or not to buy stuff?
What is the value of reading this if it doesn't express clearly buy or not buy? Is this product worth X dollars or not?
The answer, I think, is always up to the buyer.
All I can do is brief you on my experience with the product, like this book. Most of the reviewers here have given it thumbs down and I understand some of their points.
I had to use this book because of my schools decision...
It is not a waste as others might have you believe.
First of all, it was excellent for exam preparation. The review questions and the vocabulary check at the end of each chapter made it a quick search and find for last minute cramming.
Further, it is written with the student in mind and that translates into pages full of very valuable info packets, easy to retrieve and reuse.
I also found this book helpful for a paper on the EROS OS and that wasn't quite as cut and dried as it sounds since the author is Windows, UNIX, and LINUX centric.
Can it be improved ? No doubt.
Is it too expensive ? Yes, but then all text books are.
Bottom line: It can be an asset to your library, depending on your particular needs. It is a good beginning text for understanding Operating Systems.

I've just finished using this book for a course and I wanted to write a review while the information was still fresh in my mind. However because mine looks to be the only positive review I will probably fall into the trap of rebutting some of the other reviews.

First of all, I usually rate Stallings' books at 5 stars - they've taught me a lot. While this one isn't his best, it's nothing to sneeze at, and better than most texts on similar subjects. The writing is drier than his other texts, but it's fairly concise and very clear, difficult to achieve with such a technical subjct matter!

One reviewer complained that it was difficult to read through in one go - well what do you expect from a book about low-level operating system architecture, it's not Agatha Christie! I found it easy to follow, learn and summarise the concepts, the questions and problems were mostly relevant (and there were a lot, so choosing a subset wasn't hard) and mostly it was pretty interesting (if you happen to like this sort of stuff).

It's one fault is it fails to cover specific coding techniques and examples on an implementation level. However since this would have to be platform- or environment-specific, that's probably on purpose. I would guess most courses would have seperate course material covering implementation, depending on what environment they were interested in or was available.

All in all it's a good book and it'll help you learn stuff. That's the point right?

My Operating Systems course used this book and we were assigned chapters that did not coincide. Lack of editing, and no source code for process and child process creation, nor thread or how a thread can spawn another thread. This book is incredibly disappointing. This book does not read well at all.

I would recommend Operating System Concepts by Abraham Silberschatz (updated for Windows XP)good for a college course.

This book serves as a good reference, as it contains just about every topic related to operating systems. Like an encyclopedia, however, this is not a book that you want to read cover to cover. While all the material is there, it is not necessarily in any logical order and the material is presented in an extremely dry but straight-forward manner. I found other operating system texts, such as Tanenbaum, to be better for tutorial-style learning. But as a reference text, this book can't be beat.

I am a nerd. As a student at the end of my Junior year, CS Grads wonder how I know more about topics they studied in 400 level courses than they do. The answer is simple; I enjoy learning. I read texts for fun.

With that in mind, I think this book may be the worst book on OSs that I have seen. It is incomplete and not enjoyable, even to the most enthusiastic student. I much prefer Tanenbaum's book to this.

BYU is dropping this book after using it for one semester of use. I am happy about that, but I only wish I could get a refund. This book is not a keeper.