Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces

I had Remzi for two courses at UW, one of them being Operating Systems. He's the best professor I've ever had, and this book is an amazing tool for learning the basics of an Operating System. It's a quick read, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a free Intro to OS resource.

This book hadn’t been written yet when I was in undergrad. But this year, I found it and worked through it. Even with 20 years writing software professionally under my belt, the ways this book shifted my perceptions on topics I assumed I knew well was surprising! I also find it charming that the book is co-authored by a married couple.

Using this textbook right now for my grad-level OS class (I'm a student). Definitely one of the most readable textbooks I've ever used -- the authors actually try to impart some personality into the writing. I'm not 100% sold on how they divide the book into 3 parts -- virtualization, concurrency, persistence -- since not everything in an OS fits precisely into one section (e.g., multi-core scheduling is in virtualization but could also fall under concurency). Still, for the price…

It's great to see resources like this popping up. When I was in school we used the Tanenbaum book, even if it was heavily skewed to his belief that microkernels were better (Torvalds and Tanenbaum fought in an epic flame war). At the University of Arizona, we implemented in our class projects various stages of an operating system kernel, such as a process/thread scheduler, user/kernel mode functions, message passing (IPC/mailboxes), locking/semaphores/mutexes, signals, paged memory, and a file system in this…