Filesystems

Practical File System Design with the Be File System

Format: Paperback
Author: Dominic Giampaolo
ReleaseDate: 15 January, 1999
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
Rating:

Online Copy Available
It's been out of print for a little while, but I contacted the author and he was happy to release a pdf of it on his website: http://nobius. Great book for those who want to get into file system design, but don't know where to start.org/. I would highly recommend it!.

Decent survey of ideas, needs more breadth, depth, clarity
The author seems very knowledgeable in general, and it's a shame he didn't have more time to add some more breadth to the book. As other reviewers have pointed out, the author starts off by apologetically lamenting that he didn't have much time to go into very detailed analysis on other file systems. Some of my all-time favorite books are Patterson and Hennessey's two computer architecture books, because they are very dense with a wide range of well-explained ideas. This book is much less dense.

Perhaps the most annoying thing about this book though is that he doesn't finish his thoughts. I felt that often, just as he was getting to the interesting part after cutting through the fluffy descriptions of his design choices, he would leave the topic and not come back. The must frustrating part of this was that after skipping over many pertinent details of how he actually built the BeFS, he spends an excruciating amount of time describing the vnode layer and the exact API that the file system driver must write too -- something I feel would have been better left to a Be-specific API programming manual.

The editing could have used some help. Grammar and flow were pretty good, the book was readable. However, the author too often finished discussions by saying, "we didn't have time. " This is annoying and gets old.

Also annoying was the repetion of some lines of thought unecessarily. For instance, he talks about B+ trees and then instead of finishing the conversation, wanders away and talks about something else, and then wanders back and repeats himself before continuing.

Overall organization was a little sloppy, with summary after summary of what was just discussed or what will be discussed next. Focus was also affected by the author's understandable tendency to spend too much time describing the minute details of this or that "tricky" implementation issue that he encountered while build his piece of the BeOS. Obviously he is proud of his accomplishments, and he should be, but I felt the subtle back-patting going on at various points in the book's explanations complicated them unnecessarily with testaments to the author's debugging and optimization skill, rather than providing a complete road-map and "beware" warnings to feature implementors. As I've already pointed out, the book doesn't have enough detail to implement something from, so it's kind of awkward for these very complete descriptions of certain types of problems to be present in the text.

I thought the "summary" sections at the end of the chapters were too creampuff to be useful -- I didn't pay for Cliffs' Notes in my book.

Overall, a reasonably worthwhile purchase, especially given the derth of material in this area, but there are more technical, better explained resources on the net that should also be consulted for more info about file system design.

Decent survey of ideas, needs more breadth, depth, clarity
The author seems very knowledgeable in general, and it's a shame he didn't have more time to add some more breadth to the book. As other reviewers have pointed out, the author starts off by apologetically lamenting that he didn't have much time to go into very detailed analysis on other file systems. Some of my all-time favorite books are Patterson and Hennessey's two computer architecture books, because they are very dense with a wide range of well-explained ideas. This book is much less dense.

Perhaps the most annoying thing about this book though is that he doesn't finish his thoughts. I felt that often, just as he was getting to the interesting part after cutting through the fluffy descriptions of his design choices, he would leave the topic and not come back. The must frustrating part of this was that after skipping over many pertinent details of how he actually built the BeFS, he spends an excruciating amount of time describing the vnode layer and the exact API that the file system driver must write too -- something I feel would have been better left to a Be-specific API programming manual.

The editing could have used some help. Grammar and flow were pretty good, the book was readable. However, the author too often finished discussions by saying, "we didn't have time. " This is annoying and gets old.

Also annoying was the repetion of some lines of thought unecessarily. For instance, he talks about B+ trees and then instead of finishing the conversation, wanders away and talks about something else, and then wanders back and repeats himself before continuing.

Overall organization was a little sloppy, with summary after summary of what was just discussed or what will be discussed next. Focus was also affected by the author's understandable tendency to spend too much time describing the minute details of this or that "tricky" implementation issue that he encountered while build his piece of the BeOS. Obviously he is proud of his accomplishments, and he should be, but I felt the subtle back-patting going on at various points in the book's explanations complicated them unnecessarily with testaments to the author's debugging and optimization skill, rather than providing a complete road-map and "beware" warnings to feature implementors. As I've already pointed out, the book doesn't have enough detail to implement something from, so it's kind of awkward for these very complete descriptions of certain types of problems to be present in the text.

I thought the "summary" sections at the end of the chapters were too creampuff to be useful -- I didn't pay for Cliffs' Notes in my book.

Overall, a reasonably worthwhile purchase, especially given the derth of material in this area, but there are more technical, better explained resources on the net that should also be consulted for more info about file system design.