Best books, courses to learn fundamental concepts on Operating Systems? | Hacker News Reader

Best books, courses to learn fundamental concepts on Operating Systems?

16 pointsshivajikobardan10 comments

I've to get FE exam to get licensed as an engineer in Nepal. I want to learn everything properly because I feel I didn't learn to the extent that I could in college. My first hitlist is operating system and Database Management System as these two are also little bit used in my job(Linuxadmin and db admin job)

What's the best book about operating system? In college I read tanenbaum and hated every pages of it because it didn't go to much handholding that I wanted. I want handholding in book that assumes I've no preriquisites while teaching. I don't need to make an operating system. Just clear my fundamentals and become an operating system knowledgeable person. Likewise I read computer networks by stallings and I was quite meh about it. The book was good in pieces and definitely better writing than tanenbaum but I'm not exactly impressed.

I've tried the book "Linux with Operating system concepts" and didn't find it good. I'm a hands on person nowadays so would love a book that has good exercises.

The other book is by Galvin. But silber something also wrote this and I didn't like his DBMS book.

There was 1 good book when I was in college I don't remember. if it was 3 easy pieces or something. It had dinosaurs in it. Probably galvin book.

Anyway, recommend me? I will also purchase a competitive exam practice questions book for GATE which is the highest tough exam for engineering computer science.

About courses, I found NPTEL courses from top IITs too tough to understand. Are there any new online courses in the market at the moment. I studied operating system in college in around 2020.

Please recommend and help me in my journey. I also have purchased a course from Prateek jain academy which is well over 50+ hrs but I am failing to see any value in it.

https://bctengineeringnotes.blogspot.com/2019/04/operating-system.html

These are the concepts that I want to study.

"Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces" by Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau has a good mix of practical and theoretical exercises, is regularly updated and is freely accessible as PDF.

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/

Posted yesterday, "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Operating Systems" July 2023 (Open access to the Proceedings of the 2023 USENIX Annual Technical Conference) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36792157 https://www.usenix.org/system/files/atc23-jiang-yanyan.pdf

link not open.

Please check this little known but excellent book by John English [1].

This book clearly explains the basis and the fundamentals of operating systems concepts using two of the most popular OS namely Linux and Windows as case studies.

This book is going to be 20 years old next year, but since not much has changed for OS (monolithic) in the past 20 years it should be fine for the introduction to the main OS concepts.

p/s: If anyone here know Dr John English, please request him to update his book for the latest information on OS.

[1]Introduction to Operating Systems: Behind the Desktop:

https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/introduction-to-operating-syst...

I remember Andrew Tanenbaum's book as pretty good. You might give it another look. Long ago (30+) years, I read it at the same time as Silberschatz's book, and thought it much superior.

"Distributed Systems 4th edition (2023)"[^1].

I have the 3rd edition. I use it primarily as a reference, but at least the 3rd edition is surprisingly easy to read. From my experience the books assumes basic knowledge. It's about distributed systems but I found this book pretty good at explaining how things work.

[^1]: https://www.distributed-systems.net/index.php/books/ds4/

Though a bit dated, I highly recommend "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD operating System". I have read several operating systems book classics including the book by Silbershatz and Galvin that you referred to and "Unix Internals" by Maurice Bach and the "Magic Garden Explained". I found the Design and Implementation of the BSD operating system much more readable and getting into details at just the right level.

If you want a different approach, try Linux Device Drivers (LDD3, it's freely available), because during the course of the book it implements a small device driver, and so can you! This book is actually very old and some of the things may have changed, but still the fundamentals are the same and by learning how to implement a small driver you get to learn a lot about the OS.

Operating Systems: The Xinu Approach

https://xinu.cs.purdue.edu/#textbook

Read source code.

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