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Reviewer: Ted Brown

Deitel has written a comprehensive textbook suitable for an undergraduate course in operating systems. It contains topics that are part of a standard operating systems course that stresses principles. Process management is addressed in chapters 3 through 6: “Process Concepts,” “Asynchronous Concurrent Processes,” “Concurrent Programming,” and “Deadlock and Indefinite Postponement.” Chapters 7 through 9 cover storage management (storage organization and virtual storage techniques). Auxiliary storage management (disk performance, and file and database systems) is discussed in chapters 12 and 13. Enough of the chapter on analytic modeling is taken from A. O. Allen's book [1] to warrant a permission citation. Three chapters discuss “Performance: Coprocessors, RISC, and Data Flow,” “Operating System Security,” and “Distributed Computing: The Parallel Computation View.” Another six chapters contain case studies of operating systems: UNIX, DOS, MVS, VM, Apple Macintosh, and OS/2. Numerous questions and at least 50 references to the literature (based on a quick sampling) appear at the end of each chapter. No wonder the book is over 800 pages. In terms of coverage, I would recommend this book as a textbook. Deitel has done an excellent job of surveying the current ideas, solutions, and remaining problems in operating system design, but I have reservations about calling the book excellent. The writing is pedestrian. The sentences are all of medium length and simple declarative style. Normally one does not read these books for their style but for their content, but in this case the style gets in the way of the content. Maybe the editors told Deitel that the readers would not understand anything else. Also, the attempt at comprehensiveness makes too much of the material sketchy and in need of classroom augmentation; some sections are no more than a few short paragraphs.