Programmers don’t want to just read about the core concepts of operating systems. They want to learn how to apply the material by actually building applications. This new book motivates them by presenting numerous programming exercises at the code level. They are not only introduced to the OS concepts and abstractions, but also the implementation. Two design projects are integrated throughout the book that they’ll be able to follow to get them into the code. Self-assessment and review material is presented at the end of each chapter to reinforce concepts. These features help to make this an excellent resource for programmers to gain invaluable experience.
Professor Doeppner is an associate professor of computer science at Brown University. His research interests include mobile computing in education, mobile and ubiquitous computing, operating systems and distribution systems, parallel computing, and security.
Features
Rigorous but concise coverage of Operating Systems designed for a course for CS majors who will work in the computer-systems area (as opposed to a course on the basics of operating systems that every CS major should know.)
A variety of accompanying projects help students attain an intimate understanding of how the major operating-systems components work. These include a relatively straightforward project that involves writing a user-level threads library, a file-system cache manager, and a simple file system. The second, for the truly interested, gung-ho students, is to implement a good portion of a simple but fully functional operating system. (Those portions that are not pedagogically useful for students to write are provided to them.) Source code and written handouts are available at the books website
Organization of Table of Contents helps make a comprehensive programming project possible. For example, Chapter 2 provides a full tutorial on how to write multithreaded programs, both using POSIX threads and Windows threads. Though the material covers such programming from an application-program perspective, both the concepts and the practice apply to programming within an operating system.
Three types of end-of-chapter exercises provide plenty of practice. These include unstarred, starred, and two-starred problems that range from quick and easy review to challenging, exam type problems.
