Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD OS: 2nd edition available for preorder

[hadoukenio]

First edition was a great book. For anyone interested in other OS dev books, I highly recommend:

  - Design and Implementation of the UNIX Operating System (Maurice J. Bach)
  - Modern Operating Systems (Andrew S. Tanenbaum)
  - Operating Systems Design and Implementation (Andrew S. Tanenbaum)
  - Linux Core Kernel Commentary (Scott Andrew Maxwell)

[matt_heimer]

Mr. Tanenbaum seems like a nice guy. I gave away a copy of Operating Systems Design and Implementation for my osdev website a couple years ago and asked him if he'd sign a copy if I sent it to him. He apologized for not having spare copies to give away and he paid to ship the book even though I told him I would.

[kriro]

Or if you are a bit less technical "The Elements of Computing Systems". A very good book for the "I taught myself how to program and now I'm curious about OSdev" crowd.

[adding to the off topic rant: I generally agree but off the top of my head "Schrödinger programmiert Java" and the entire Schrödinger... series are decent and hit the typical US-style tone. Not sure if you count a programming book as a technical book though :)]

[wink]

Moreover there were hardly any tech books besides those 2 by Tanenbaum that I thorougly enjoyed reading as much. Not quite like a novel, but surely not as dry as usual.

Queue mildly relevant rant: I've never seen a German technical author hit the casual tone that American authors are a lot better at. Originally German tech books usually are as fun reading as manuals to a device and not entertaining at all...

[linhat]

The only non-FreeBSD systems I have to deal with by now are my Cellphone (Android) and my TV (funny enough, also Android). Made the switch from YOUR_FAVOURITE_LINUX_FLAVOUR after having to deal with (st)Ubuntu way too much at work.

Nonetheless, as much I prefer running FreeBSD on any kind of server system (as I have been for years), after using it on my (fairly new) laptop for a couple months now, I really wish there was better (new and shiny) hardware support (a commonly acknowledged FreeBSD deficiency, so yeah, I knew what I was getting myself into). Given, I only bought it because my old laptop was stolen at work, it belonging to the Haswell family did not really help (no internal WiFi [Intel IWN 7260], no hardware accelerated graphics [HD4400] and so forth...). But hey, who am I to complain, time to get hacking, which I suppose is more in the spirit of the BSD culture anyway and I'm not going back to NIX.

So yeah, glad this book got updated, most likely picking up this new edition...

[geekam]

I want to start learning internals of nix systems. Is this a good book to start with? Or is there a book on Linux (or any other nix OS) that I should begin with?

[cperciva]

If you want to understand how operating systems work, this is a very good book to start with.

If you just want to learn enough to be able to use unix, look for something else. As the title says, this book is about design and implementation, not usage.

[myg204]

I recommend the xv6 source and commentary. Here's the link: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2012/xv6.html (has a pdf you can print out along with C code listing, and with nice references). It's very similar in idea to Lyon's commentary but with a more modern C code base.

[matt_heimer]

A little older but "The Magic Garden Explained: The Internals of UNIX System V Release 4, An Open Systems Design" is a really well written book for the core UNIX concepts.

[adamnemecek]

That kind of depends on your background. I think that this book is recommended in some OS college courses as complementary reading since it describes a full blown OS and not some simpler OS that might be better suited for teaching purposes. You might want to find some OS college course that has materials available online, work through that and read this as you go along or when you are done with the course.

[JSno]

dont waste your time on BSD anymore. Linux dominates.