Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces

I wish I'd read this book years ago. This book covers 3 broad areas: virtualization, concurrency, and persistence. In my opinion the most worthwhile sections are the ones on virtualization. I found the sections on cpu virtualization (processes, interrupts, scheduling, context switches, etc) to be quite the riveting read, and super useful in my day-to-day work life. The sections on memory virtualization were equally useful, but I have to caution potential readers that this is probably the most difficult part of the book. It's written well, and everything is introduced step by step and with good motivation behind it, but... memory is just a lot more complicated than you think. Don't get discouraged if it doesn't click right away. For some reason, every book in the history of mankind has an uncontrollable urge to give the exact same treatment of concurrency as every other book, so the concurrency sections didn't "do it" for me. Finally, the persistence sections... there is some good and some bad here. The good would be the descriptions of a few unix file systems; I now have a very good understanding of what ext2/ext3/ext4/zfs are, how they work, what the tradeoffs are, and so on. I have a very good understanding of what it means to "mount" a device. I have good understanding of how paging works, and how memory can act as a cache for disk - at a low level. However, there is a lot of additional stuff in this chapter that doesn't need to be there IMO. To wit, descriptions of the various levels of hardware RAID (hardware raid is on its way out - software RAID does it all but better, and with only a small amount of overhead), and a collection of chapters on how flash-based storage works. Spoiler: flash-based storage is a nightmare. Just be glad somebody else did the work here, and cross your fingers that you never have to understand this stuff. I would happily pay full price for this book for just the virtualization parts. I am giving it 5 stars 100% because of the virtualization parts. The difference between knowing and not knowing these topics deeply is like night and day. It is difficult to impress upon you, dear reader, just how much of a difference this knowledge makes, in terms of confidence and competence in working in a unix-like environment. Finally, if you've read this far, let me recommend a followup to work through some time after this book: Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective. It has a lot of overlap with this book but is more advanced (for example, OSTEP covers memory virtualization over a hundred pages or so. CS:APP covers it in passing in like 10 pages, but uses this as the beginning of its treatment of memory mapping).

As a self-taught programmer and software engineer, I spent years with a voice inside my head telling me that low-level computing and systems engineering was not for me. This is the first book that I've been able to dive into and truly understand. I was impressed at how concise and clear the explanations are; the author's tone and light humor makes reading this fun. After just a few days with the book, I'm already 1/3rd of the way through. It really says something when a book on operating systems is a page-turner. If you're a programmer or engineer wanting to fill in the missing gaps in your knowledge, I highly recommend this.

I loved the style this book is written in. This particular book is great just as a context of ideas that are multiconnected within OS and some expertise doing homeworks at the end of each chapter while providing great tons of references for you to go really deep and master what appeared to you interesting. A surprisingly fun read for such a technical book, has jokes, dialogs, authors thoughts on each reference, it even has an easter egg to another Operating System Concepts book!

Overall, this is an outstanding textbook. The authors write with clarity and assess various aspects of their topic with the right level of detail. The book feels like it was thoughtfully arranged and refers to its own organization in a way that makes the reader understand why the author's settled on its particular structure. The awkward elephant in the room with this book is that its authors want very badly to be funny, I guess as a tool for being more approachable? The book is littered with truly bad jokes and "dialogues" that add nothing positive to the experience of the textbook. You will absolutely enjoy this book more if you skip the footnotes and dialogues. The dialogues are also alienating for adult self-study readers who arrive at this textbook by way of 'Teach Yourself CS', because they all assume that the reader is a college student.

There's good textbooks like Patt's introduction to computing book that I really learned alot from. Then there are tet books like this one, where I got it for the class but collects dust. At most, it's a fair reference, which is almost all textbooks. So Good Rating.

Book was in excellent condition, and the purchase arrived on time. Plus, this became one of my favorite OS principles books ever. Thanks!

I graduated with an MS in CS a decade or so ago and I like to refresh my knowledge about important topics now and again. I kept all of my textbooks but I hated the OS book we used, you know the one. Written by Tanenbaum... It is a bad book, but not the worst that I had to read in school. This book is clear, concise and written very well covering a good selection of topics. The price is great also. It is also available for free if you can't afford it. Now, I just need to find a better book than the awful Patterson architecture books, it has to exist.

Phenomenal book with extremely good explanations and the online material is superlatively good. I would easily recommend it over the Dinosaur book. I’m a systems engineer and work with a lot of Linux day to day and I picked this up to go over some old topics for review and next thing I had read more than half the book just from the pleasures of their explanations and analogies. I would recommend it to a beginner but I’d point out that you should have a bit of python and bash under your belt. Not meant for an absolute beginner, more for someone who has played with a Linux distro before and has ran a program through the bash shell. Not at all trying to say you could not learn from this or use it as an intro, but I’d recommend that base knowledge going in.

Great book

Great contents. Written well, reads well. Physical book itself is mediocre. Medium size book itself but huge borders mean the printed pages are small. Page quality differs within the bind too - odd. Boring cover. Find a better distributor

The authors have generously made this book available for free, which is reason enough to purchase a copy to support them. Unfortunately the binding is of the poorest quality and the spine will certainly break when stressed, which means you will start collecting loose pages very soon.

A little hard to read(small font size) and sometimes difficult to understand. Take your time to read it and at the end you will understand what OS is and how it works.

A great book on operating systems and a very fun read! I love the little snippets of humour the authors have put in here — they really make the content more approachable. As for the content, the book covers a vast range of topics in Virtualisation, Concurrency, and Persistence (with some additional stuff on Distributed Computing). The level of depth is appropriate for the length of the book and the authors give you a whole host of references at the end of each chapter along with little descriptions of each so you can study whatever topic interests you further. The code in the book is written in C, so it may feel dated, especially as it relates to concurrency (C++ has a better concurrency library), but overall is quite helpful if you want to see what the implementation of a certain functionality would look like. TLDR: 5/5 would recommend. I read this book cover to cover and will get started with the end-of-chapter exercises very soon. Money well spent. 😁