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Comment by song | Hacker News Reader

I strongly recommend reading all of his books. They are very clear and non boring and the knowledge you get from understanding them is really the basics of what any programer should know I believe (well except maybe for the distributed systems book).

After reading this faq, I'm very curious about the travel book.

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Loved the distributed systems book. It is just sad that field has not left academia yet. We should be in a world where every programmer should know the contents of that book, instead of reinventing the wheel as we are doing now.

I love his Operating Systems book [0] which explains OS Concepts using Minix code

[0] - http://www.amazon.com/dp/0131429388

I recommend buying your computer books in India. US Price for this book is $150 USD. India price is around Rs. 427 which is around $7 USD. Textbook prices, like everything related to education and healthcare are excessively high in the US. A reasonable price would be around $50, which is what this book would cost if it wasn't a textbook.

The same book in Amazon India: http://www.amazon.in/Operating-Systems-Implementation-Tanenb...

Update: Cheaper books bought in India may not be commercially exported out of India

Yeah, do they ship to Europe?

Not to Spain, at least: "Sorry, this item can't be shipped to your selected address."

And not to México either... :(

I sourced it in the UK as an (IIRC) "International Edition"

I was eager to take your advice. Problem is it can't be shipped to the US.

See LeonRobrotsky's suggestion with AbeBooks.

Another suggestion is Barnes & Noble. (Yes, really.)

I myself had borrowed a copy through interlibrary loan back in November after checking Amazon for <$50 dollar copies, only to be blown away that they were more like $160-$190. If you've used ILL, though, you probably know how tedious it can be.

A couple of weeks ago, I had to kill some time, so I meandered into a Barnes & Noble for the first time in years and on a whim tried to look up Operating Systems: Design and Implementation on bn.com. Turns out, bn.com operates not just to sell B&N wares, but also apparently as a sort of hub for third-party sellers, (just?) like Amazon. I was surprised to see the market rate for used copies was $34.50, so I snagged one.

Meanwhile, the AbeBooks link above has a shrink-wrapped copy for $16.52.

Takeaway: don't assume that Amazon is the end-all-be-all, even for books.

Just look on AbeBooks:

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=978812032...

Irony of ironies: if you look at the bottom of Amazon's front page, you'll see they own Abe.

BTW how different is the 3rd edition from the 1st? I had it for my OS course (along with the Silberschatz book), but it was >25 years ago. Still have the Minix disks somewhere, I think. It was awesome to get a # prompt on a 8086, but in the end, what mattered was to have GNU utils, gcc, emacs and X11 on a 386, which meant Linux.

Completely different. MINIX was 100% overhauled.

Right at this moment I'm reading Computer Networks (4th Edition) and loving it! I enjoy his writing style, mainly because he makes jokes all the time! Funny guy :)

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