Operating System Theory

Operating Systems : A Systematic View (6th Edition)

Format: Hardcover
Author: William S. Davis
ReleaseDate: 21 April, 2004
Publisher: Addison Wesley
Rating:

Excellent breadth and clarity, organization and details wanting
As noted by other reviewers, the book doesn't know where to go after the first section -- it meanders into too-brief-to-be-useful hands-on tutorial sections for the middle portion, then moves on to touch open a few particulars with a few popular systems in a way remniscent of excerpts from a heavier text before concluding with a section on distributed computing (the bulk of which concerns remote file access via CIFS/SMB). Unlike other OS books I've seen, A Systematic View is a clearly written, concise introduction to the foundations of operating systems -- or at least the first few chapters are. Scattered amongst the latter half of the book are some decent portions on virtual memory and x86 architectural features.

The book would benefit greatly from having the tutorials moved to online appendices, the OS-specific analysis moved to standard appendices, and the core principles delved into more deeply. Davis and Rajkumar could also do with a few more technical proofreaders; while grammatical, spelling, and typographical errors are kept to a minimum, terminology is used oddly at best throughout the work with many of the "real-world" examples being flat-out wrong.

Reservations aside, I have not found a more approachable introductory/survey text. It's just a pity that there are so many problems with it even in the 6th edition. With a bit of work this could be a respectable upper-division text, but at the moment I can only recommend it for two-year technical/community colleges.

Excellent Book!
The only downfall of this book was its limited text on Linux. This book gives excellent explanation of how an operating system works and will suit a new computer user or someone on a more advanced level. Otherwise its a great book and worth having!.

Not a college-level text
It includes shallow coverage of topics one would expect in an OS course, but not at a level appropriate of such a course, and then spends a tremendous amount of space on computer literacy issues, like how to use MS-DOS and Unix command lines, etc. This is not a college-level text. I think the authors couldn't decide whether they wanted to write an OS text for non-majors, or a computer literacy text.

In their preface, the authors seem confused about the meanings of the words "applied" and "theoretical," saying this is an applied text, and suggesting that texts for actual OS courses are theoretical. While I will grant them that pretty much any other OS text out there has more theoretical content, this one also has less applicable content than most.

Had the cover and preface made it clear this text was predominantly a computer literacy text, I'd have had no problem with it, nor would it have made its way to my bookshelf. But the title, the text on the back cover, and the preface are all misleading.