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Wednesday, Nov 4
At a glance
- Condition
- New
- Format
- Paperback
- Dimensions
- 6 x 1.69 x 9 in
- Weight
- 2.2 lb
- Publication date
- September 1, 2018
- Language
- English
- Print length
- 747 pages
Description
OSTEP ("oh step"), or the "the comet book", represents the culmination of years of teaching intro to operating systems to both undergraduates and graduates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Computer Sciences department for nearly 25 years.The book is organized around three concepts fundamental to OS construction: virtualization (of CPU and memory), concurrency (locks and condition variables), and persistence (disks, RAIDS, and file systems).The material, if combined with serious project work and homeworks, will lead students to a deeper understanding and appreciation of modern OSes.The authors, Remzi and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, are both professors of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They have been doing research in computer systems for 30 years, working together since their first graduate operating systems class at U.C. Berkeley in 1993. Since that time, they have published over 100 papers on the performance and reliability of many aspects of modern computer systems, with a special focus on file and storage systems. Their work has been recognized with numerous best-paper awards, a test of time award, and some of their innovations can be found in the Linux and BSD operating systems today. Both were named ACM Fellows for "contributions to storage and computer systems" and both received the ACM-SIGOPS Mark Weiser award for "outstanding leadership, innovation, and impact in storage and computer systems research." Read more
Specs 8
| Publisher | CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform |
|---|---|
| Publication date | September 1, 2018 |
| Language | English |
| Print length | 747 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 198508659X |
| ISBN-13 | 93 |
| Item Weight | 2.2 pounds |
| Dimensions | 6 x 1.69 x 9 inches |
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Top Amazon Reviews
Incredible treatment of virtualization. You can probably skip or skim the rest.
Format: Paperback
I wish I'd read this book years ago. This book covers 3 broad areas: virtualization, concurrency, and persistence. In my opinion the most worthwhile sections are the ones on virtualization. I found the sections on cpu virtualization (processes, interrupts, scheduling, context switches, etc) to be quite the riveting read, and super useful in my day-to-day work life. The sections on memory virtualization were equally useful, but I have to caution potential readers that this is probably the most difficult part of the book. It's written well, and everything is introduced step by step and with good motivation behind it, but... memory is just a lot more complicated than you think. Don't get discouraged if it doesn't click right away. For some reason, every book in the history of mankind has an uncontrollable urge to give the exact same treatment of concurrency as every other book, so the concurrency sections didn't "do it" for me. Finally, the persistence sections... there is some good and some bad here. The good would be the descriptions of a few unix file systems; I now have a very good understanding of what ext2/ext3/ext4/zfs are, how they work, what the tradeoffs are, and so on. I have a very good understanding of what it means to "mount" a device. I have good understanding of how paging works, and how memory can act as a cache for disk - at a low level. However, there is a lot of additional stuff in this chapter that doesn't need to be there IMO. To wit, descriptions of the various levels of hardware RAID (hardware raid is on its way out - software RAID does it all but better, and with only a small amount of overhead), and a collection of chapters on how flash-based storage works. Spoiler: flash-based storage is a nightmare. Just be glad somebody else did the work here, and cross your fingers that you never have to understand this stuff. I would happily pay full price for this book for just the virtualization parts. I am giving it 5 stars 100% because of the virtualization parts. The difference between knowing and not knowing these topics deeply is like night and day. It is difficult to impress upon you, dear reader, just how much of a difference this knowledge makes, in terms of confidence and competence in working in a unix-like environment. Finally, if you've read this far, let me recommend a followup to work through some time after this book: Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective. It has a lot of overlap with this book but is more advanced (for example, OSTEP covers memory virtualization over a hundred pages or so. CS:APP covers it in passing in like 10 pages, but uses this as the beginning of its treatment of memory mapping).
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Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2025 by Yay
Critical knowledge contained within → just keep reading!
Format: Paperback
The single most important resource for OS concepts that I have read so far. The tone of the writing is easy on the brain which helped me better focus on subject matter and the reference material. Finishing my first read through now, then I am planning go through all of the exercises during a second pass soon after. I have never enjoyed reading a text book to this level before, highly recommended. Paired nicely with "The design and implementation of the 4.3 BSD Unix OS" Misplaced my first copy once and replaced it pretty quickly, later found it so now I have a weathered marked up version for my bag and a new-looking copy for the shelf :D
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Reviewed in the United States on March 10, 2026 by AxCx
Good
Format: Paperback
Interesting content and it’s got some humor in the writing which is very welcome when tackling a hard subject like this.
Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2026 by Nick
Quite better then dry dinosaur one
Format: Paperback
I loved the style this book is written in. This particular book is great just as a context of ideas that are multiconnected within OS and some expertise doing homeworks at the end of each chapter while providing great tons of references for you to go really deep and master what appeared to you interesting. A surprisingly fun read for such a technical book, has jokes, dialogs, authors thoughts on each reference, it even has an easter egg to another Operating System Concepts book!
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Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2023 by Xtrullor
Go get it.
This book has been well written. It helps me a lot for to understand many concepts of operating system.
Reviewed in the United States on October 2, 2019 by Minh
Excellent
Format: Paperback
I graduated with an MS in CS a decade or so ago and I like to refresh my knowledge about important topics now and again. I kept all of my textbooks but I hated the OS book we used, you know the one. Written by Tanenbaum... It is a bad book, but not the worst that I had to read in school. This book is clear, concise and written very well covering a good selection of topics. The price is great also. It is also available for free if you can't afford it. Now, I just need to find a better book than the awful Patterson architecture books, it has to exist.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2020 by Rusty Shackleford
Incredible, fun book - unexpected page-turner
Format: Paperback
As a self-taught programmer and software engineer, I spent years with a voice inside my head telling me that low-level computing and systems engineering was not for me. This is the first book that I've been able to dive into and truly understand. I was impressed at how concise and clear the explanations are; the author's tone and light humor makes reading this fun. After just a few days with the book, I'm already 1/3rd of the way through. It really says something when a book on operating systems is a page-turner. If you're a programmer or engineer wanting to fill in the missing gaps in your knowledge, I highly recommend this.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2023 by M Zito
Solid Overview of Operating Systems
Format: Kindle
Overall, this is an outstanding textbook. The authors write with clarity and assess various aspects of their topic with the right level of detail. The book feels like it was thoughtfully arranged and refers to its own organization in a way that makes the reader understand why the author's settled on its particular structure. The awkward elephant in the room with this book is that its authors want very badly to be funny, I guess as a tool for being more approachable? The book is littered with truly bad jokes and "dialogues" that add nothing positive to the experience of the textbook. You will absolutely enjoy this book more if you skip the footnotes and dialogues. The dialogues are also alienating for adult self-study readers who arrive at this textbook by way of 'Teach Yourself CS', because they all assume that the reader is a college student.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2021 by Ryan Mease