Operating System Theory

Operating Systems, Third Edition

Format: Hardcover
Author: Gary Nutt
ReleaseDate: 03 July, 2003
Publisher: Addison Wesley
Rating:

Wordy, convoluted, boring
He attempts to take a mathematical approach to such simple topics as first-come-first-served scheduling algorithm where the math simply confuses the matter. Nutt spends an amazing number of pages covering simple topics, yet his writing is so convoluted, learning from this book is very difficult. Overall, this book is boring and hard to understand.

uninformative and incoherent
He is verbose and repetitive and spends a lot of time on pointless topics, such as notation for sets. Gary Nutt is incapable of writing. Like so many mediocre authors, he fills the text with pseudo-mathematical notation to make it seem more sophisticated. The typesetting is deplorable, and I recommend he learn LaTeX.

Nutt assumes the reader is a complete idiot. The book is an overview of the concepts of operating systems, which aren't remotely sophisticated. You will not learn anything practical about Operating Systems, and the concepts he covers are so trivial that you could learn in all in a day (once you extract them from the hundreds of pages or jargon and silly diagrams).

I recommend "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation" by Andrew Tanenbaum and Al Woodhull instead of this trash.

Yes, this REALLY IS the WORST CS BOOK EVER
If you're ever assigned this book in your college OS class, either drop the class immediately or ask the professor to reconsider (then drop the class). I usually try not to review something that several people have had the same comments about it that I have, but this book is so terrible that I feel I must help to emphasize that fact. This book has absolutely no valuable information in it what-so-ever. As a matter of fact, it barely has any information in it at all. The problems and lab assignments are the most confusing ones I have ever seen. The instructions have absolutely no logic and sometimes contradict themselves. The code that is supposed to help is often completely wrong. The questions at the end of the chapters generally have little to do with the material--or lack there of--contained in the chapter (or elsewhere in the book, for that matter). Also, most of the labs that say "this is to be done in operating system x" usually cannot be done in that operating system. Additionally, different versions of operating systems (other than Windows, which apparently can be broken down into NT and non-NT anyway) don't exist--Linux is UNIX is Solaris is BSD. Perhaps if the author spent less time writing jokes and more time writing something useful this book might be worth half its weight in salt. I can't believe this sort of doorstop could ever be published by such a prestegious company as Addison-Wesley.