An Annotated Bibliography

Book Selecting Guidelines

Here are some guidelines for winnowing the available books to a handful of candidates:

Compare the book’s table of contents with the schedule to make sure the topics mentioned in the schedule (both the section titles and the lecture titles) appear in the table of contents. You can also look in the index, but a topic mentioned in the table of contents suggests more thorough coverage than a topic mentioned only in the index (although a topic with a sizeable index entry suggests thorough coverage too).
Compare test questions and answers in previous versions of the course to the material covered in the book. The book may not lay out the answer (you are, after all, dealing with test questions), but you should be able to piece together the questions and answers from relevant parts of the book.

Once you have the candidate books, you can use your tastes and preferences to pick the final one or two books for the course.

Books with call numbers can be found in the Guggenheim Library. Linked material from the ACM or the IEEE can be downloaded for free from the library within the monmouth.edu domain.

Textbooks

Modern Operating Systems by Andrew Tanenbaum from Prentice Hall, 2008. QA 76.76 O63 T359 2008

Operating Systems, 3rd edition, by Harvey and Paul Deitel and David Choffnes, Prentice Hall, 2004. QA76.76 O63 D46 2004

If Stallings is a machine, the Deitels are a factory.

Operating Systems and Middleware by Max Hailperin from Thompson, 2007.

About half the chapters are about processes and concurrency, but otherwise a good intermediate-level textbook. Both editions are available on-line.

Operating System Concepts, 8th edition, by Abraham Silberschatz, Greg Gagne, and Peter Galvin from Wiley, 2009. QA76.76.O63 S5583 2009

A good, detailed textbook with programming examples in Java.

Operating Systems Design and Implementation, 2nd edition, by Andrew Tanenbaum and Albert Woodhull, Prentice Hall, 2004.

The Minix book. The second half of the book is the source for the Minix operating system. The first half has occasional references into the Minix source, but otherwise the second half is just a listing, leavened only by code comments. If that’s a little too rich for you, look at Comer’s book.

Operating Systems Fundamentals by D. Irtegov, Charles River Media, 2003.

A terrible book, incomplete and wrong, although it does have a good discussion of dynamic loading. Avoid.

Operating Systems In Depth by Thomas Doeppner from Wiley, 2011.

Operating Systems: Internals and Design Principles, 6th edition, by William Stallings, Prentice Hall, 2009. QA76.76.O63 S733 2009

Stallings is a machine; he cranks out competent, if not necessarily inspiring, books.

Operating Systems: A Modern Perspective, 2nd edition, by Gary Nutt from Addison Wesley, 2002. QA76.76.O63 N89 2002

The first edition of this book was good; later editions get progressively less good.

An Operating Systems Vade Mecum, 2nd edition, by Raphael Finkel, Prentice-Hall, 1988.

Out of date in a lot of respects, but a good, basic introduction to operating systems. Once you make it through this book, you’ll be prepared to move on to more up-do-date, advanced books. Available on-line

Principles of Operating Systems by Brian Stuart, Thompson, 2009.

Keeps a close relation between theory and practice in real operating systems, and earns extra points for using the Inferno operating system.

Other Material

A Comparison of Three Distributed File System Architectures: vnode, Sprite, and Plan 9 by Brent Welch in Computing Systems, Spring 1994.

A comparison of three significantly different ways of providing remote file systems.

Alphonse, Wait Here For My Signal! by Stephen Hartley in Proceedings of the Thirteenth Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, March 1999.

One of the may cruel tricks Java plays is presenting monitors as if they were the typical high-level concurrency control mechanism when they are, in fact, low-level misbehaving beasts. This paper illustrates the point.

Computer Organization & Design, 2nd edition, by David Patterson and John Hennessy, Morgan Kaufmann, 1998. QA76.9.C643 P37 2009 (fourth edition)

This is way more book than is needed for a subsidiary, but important, topic in this class, but it’s a good reference to have on hand.

The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD UNIX Operating System by Marshall McKusick, Keith Bostic, Michael Karels, and John Quarterman, Addison Wesley, 1996.

An excellent companion to a more general-purpose operating-systems textbook. A more recent version of this book covers FreeBSD, one of the follow-on systems to BSD UNIX.

Developing your own 32-bit operating system by Richard Burgess, SAMS Publishing, 1995.

What an operating-systems course should be: a multitasking, message-based, real-time operating system developed step-by-step in assembler.

The Expected Lifetime of Single-Address-Space Operating Systems by David Kotz and Preston Crow in Computing Systems, Summer, 1996.

Imagine there’s only one address space for all processes in an operating system. How long would such an operating system last before there’s no more address space available? The answer is, as always, “it depends.”

Java’s Insecure Parallelism by in Per Brinch Hansen ACM Sigplan Notices, April, 1999.

How Java’s synchronized classes are a poor implementation of monitors, and how that effects the ability to write correct concurrent programs in Java.

Lottery Scheduling: Flexible Proportional-Share Resource Management by Carl Waldspurger and William Weihl in First Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, November, 1994.

Lottery scheduling is a flexible randomized scheduling protocol.

Operating System Design by Douglas Comer, CRC Press, 2012.

Another book creating an operating system, this time it’s Xinu. Unlike Tanenbaum and Woodhull, which has a big block of source, the source and explanations are interwoven throughout the book. This book isn’t listed with the textbooks because it assumes a basic knowledge of operating systems internals.

Plan 9 from Bell Labs by Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, Sean Doward, Bob Flandrena, Ken Thompson, Howard Trickey and Phil Winterbottom in Computing Systems, Summer, 1995.

Plan 9 is the follow-on to Unix. It came, but alas, it came too late. Never the less, it contains ideas worth learning well enough to steal.

A Survey of Processors with Explicit Multithreading by Theo Ungerer, Borut Robič, and Jurijin Šilc in ACM Computing Surveys, March, 2003.

What has happened to CPU architectures since physics made following Moore’s law an impractically expensive way to improve performance.

Systems Programming in Parallel Logic Languages by Ian Foster, Prentice Hall, 1990

Using functional programming to implement an operating system? Using Prolog?? That’s just crazy talk.

Threads without the Pain by Andreas Gustaffsson in ACM Queue, November, 2005.

We love threads because concurrency; we hate threads because concurrency. It doesn’t have to be this way.

The Virtual File System Interface in 4.4BSD by Marshall Kirk McKusick in Computing Systems, Winter 1995.

The 4.4BSD virtual filesystem interface which provides operations to manage the hierarchical file system name space and to manage the flat file store, including the always helpful stacking file systems.

This page last modified on 2014 October 10.

An Annotated Bibliography

Operating SystemsSpring 2015

Book Selecting Guidelines

Textbooks

Other Material

Operating Systems
Spring 2015