The inside front cover of this book lists nine books by the author, all of them dealing with aspects of systems and communications. Stallings is prolific. The stated purpose of this work is “to provide the reader with a solid understanding of the key mechanisms of modern operating systems, the types of design trade-offs and decisions involved in OS design, and the context within which the operating system functions” (p. vii). It is intended as a textbook for a one-semester undergraduate course as well as for professionals.
Ten chapters make up the book:
Computer System Hardware
Operating System Overview
Process Description and Control
Concurrency
Memory Management
Scheduling
I/O Management and Disk Scheduling
File Management
Networking and Distributed Processing
Security
The chapters conclude with problems. The book also has an appendix on queueing analysis, a glossary of 123 terms, a list of 270 references, and an index. The treatment is traditional, including a description of the historical development of operating system ideas and implementations. The traditional orientation is also evident in the frequent references to the purpose of parts of the operating system being to optimize the use of the hardware. As the cost of hardware has decreased and personal computers have become widely available, it seems better to consistently think about the service and response to be delivered to users. Some of the motivational statements in the book do emphasize this, but not all of them.
Some minor typographical problems occur (such as several numerical entries in the parts of Figure 1.4, “Example of Program Execution,” and the omission of an arrow from Figure 2.20, “OS Topics,” when it is repeated on the front cover), but these are easy to deal with and do not detract from the main thrust of the presentation. The book contains a great deal of information, including the use of three different widely used systems as running examples.
The major ideas of modern operating systems are discussed in an accessible style. The book should be considered by those choosing undergraduate operating systems texts, but it does not obviously dominate the competition.
