As distributed computer systems become more pervasive, there is a need for a book that explains how their operating systems are designed and implemented. This book, which is a revised and expanded Part II of the best selling MODERN OPERATING SYSTEMS, fulfills that need.
KEY TOPICS: It covers the material from the original book, including communication, synchronization, processes and file systems, and adds new material on distributed shared memory. It also contains 4 detailed case studies, Amoeba, Mach, Chorus, and OSF/DCE. Tanenbaum's trademark writing style provides the reader with a thorough yet concise treatment of distributed systems.
Customer Reviews & Comments
The book contains concepts and algorithms in the first half, and then lists (I think 3) distributed operating systems in the back as case studies. The book is very readable and entertaining, assuming you've had a course (or the equivalent) in (single machine) operating systems. This book covers all major aspects of distributed operating systems at reasonable level of depth -- you can't expect too much detail if you're going to cover all the topics. There's no examples of "real" code in the text, I think that's a good thing. There are a number of useful algorithms discussed in each chapter. This book is aging, and a little of the information is already dated (7 years old).
