Schaum's Outline of Operating Systems

By J. Archer Harris

Book Overview

Confusing Textbooks? Missed Lectures? Not Enough Time?

Fortunately for you, there's Schaum's Outlines. More than 40 million students have trusted Schaum's to help them succeed in the classroom and on exams. Schaum's is the key to faster learning and higher grades in every subject. Each Outline presents all the essential course information in an easy-to-follow, topic-by-topic format. You also get hundreds of examples, solved problems, and practice exercises to test your skills.

This Schaum's Outline gives you

Practice problems with full explanations that reinforce knowledgeCoverage of the most up-to-date developments in your course fieldIn-depth review of practices and applications

Fully compatible with your classroom text, Schaum's highlights all the important facts you need to know. Use Schaum's to shorten your study time-and get your best test scores

Schaum's Outlines-Problem Solved.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0071364358
• ISBN13: 9780071364355
• Release Date: November 2001
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
• Length: 234 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 8.2" x 10.8"

Customer Reviews

Satisfied Customer

My book was in perfect condition. It was not damaged during shipping. Delivery was fast. I had regular shipping, ordered it on a Wednesday and it was here by Friday or Saturday.

Good at what it does

What it does: lead the reader through the basic concepts of classic operating systems: processes, synchronization, memory, virtual memory, file systems, IO, and security. Each section alternates between text and answered problems, as is usual for a Schaum's Outline. That's very helpful - putting a concept to use on one problem drives the point home better than a hundred pages of reading. The reader who completes this book, working a good number of the problems, will have seen most of the topics presented in a one-term OS class. No problem there. The book necessarily lacks in breadth and in detail, however. This book doesn't try to be a Tanenbaum, and isn't, so it skips many crucial topics. The interaction of hardware and OS is very under-represented. That includes things like memory-mapped IO, interrupt levels, multiprocessor configurations, and cache coherency. It mentions real-time systems, without discussing the many ways that embedded kernels differ from Windows. It discusses priveleged instructions, but skips context switching between privelege levels. The section on virtual memory skips a lot - how it interacts with a system's process structure, multiple address spaces, shared pages, reasons for non-pageable memory, and more. It brings up ancient topics, like swapping and overlays, that have just about no significance in major commercial systems. Having brought them up, it fails to mention why they're no longer relevant. But there's only so much you can cram into a 228-page summary. The content is worth three stars at best, but I give it one more for (mostly) meeting its goals. //wiredweird

Excellent supplement

I have over 10 Schaum's guides for my various courses. I would say this OS guide is perhaps the best one along with the Seymour Lipschutz's erudite "probability" (not to be confused with Murray R. Spiegel's befuddled attempt for Schaum's).The last reviewer's comments seemed unwarranted especially since this book has more then enough problems on semaphores even if it's not as strong on file systems. This book is spot on covering the important parts of the classic operating systems curriculum from the sublime Tannebaum to the feckless Nutt. This book has an abundance of sample problems from all the major topics: File Systems, Interprocess communication, Device I/O, Networks, Security, and the dreaded Virtual Memory. Besides this the author covers algorithms, from the Philosophers to Bankers, from Hard drive c-scan to Paging LRU. I find the author easy to understand, complete, and very much in tune with what you will likely be tested on. I can honestly say this 200 page book was more valuable to me then the pescribed text.