That uses a very simple educational architecture designed for ease of learning, though. If you prefer a good introductory resource for real-world operating systems, I just finished Georgia Tech's Intro to OS graduate course[1] and found it very accessible as well, and now feel reasonably comfortable with the theory when reading about OS topics elsewhere.
[0] http://www.nand2tetris.org/
[1] https://www.udacity.com/course/introduction-to-operating-sys...
If you want to hack on your main operating system, then yeah, you'll probably want to switch to Linux, but I wouldn't do that yet.
If you were on Windows, that would be a different story.
> This book is will be especially beneficial to students who’ve just finished their first C/C++ course.
That's what I was looking for.