Ask HN: Best textbooks for learning operating systems | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best textbooks for learning operating systems

47 pointssgillen12 comments

For someone comfortable with programming in C (say, enough to pass tech interviews with the language) what are some good textbooks or other resources to learn more about operating systems.

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Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces[0] coupled with Xv6[1].

Once you understand the fundamental ideas, you can move on to a specific real world implementation like The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System by Marshall Kirk McKusick et. al or Linux Kernel Development by Robert Love.

[0]: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/

[1]: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2012/xv6.html

I have heard good things about the 'Dinosaur book', "Operating Systems Concepts" by Silberschatz.[0]

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1119456339/

It's good. I found it way more readable and engaging than other CS textbooks.

I can second the recommendation of Robert Love's books on Linux (https://rlove.org/) as well as "How Linux Works" by Brian Ward. I personally enjoyed "Linux Kernel Development" by Robert Love more than the former as it teaches you more about Kernel internals (IMHO). The drawback is that it's a bit outdated already (it's based on the 2.6 kernel) but on the other hand most things are still relevant as far as I know. Andrew Tanenbaum et. al.'s "Modern Operating Systems" is a good reference to learn about operating systems otherwise, independent of Linux.

If you want a quick, concise, pragmatic course to learn about OS, I would recommend Paul Krzyzanowski's OS Course that he teaches at Rutgers University. [1]. See course material at [2].

[1] https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~pxk/416/index.html [2] https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~pxk/416/syllabus.html

On the Windows OS side of the house, the Windows Internals book is a great dive into the nether regions of the OS.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/learn/windows-...

Try ops-class.org from Geoffrey Challen that uses OS/161 for programming assignments, all of the material is free. I'm doing that one now. Highly recommend Operating Systems in Three Easy pieces as well.

Operating Systems Design & Implementation

The book is about MINIX operating system, a operating system without hacks, to showcase the concepts.

Linux is a fork from MINIX.

> Linux is a fork from MINIX.

This is false. Linux kernel even in the early stages didn't share any code with MINIX. MINIX had a restrictive license and this was partly why Linus decided to roll his own OS kernel.

Further, the two OSs differ fundamentally from an architecture standpoint (microkernel vs monolithic kernel).

I love the XINU book. Just beautiful writing. Used it recently while building my own memory allocator. Will give you a lot of insight.

The Thomas Anderson books are a multi-volume guide to OSs.

As far as textbooks go "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System" by McKusick is a good resource on the UNIX side of things.

Linux Device Drivers is nice, and free.

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