a weak attempt at an introductory text...in trying to simplify the subject too much meat has been pared from the bones...the result is a sometimes confusing and often plainly erroneous text...spend the extra seven bucks and get either stallings or tanenbaum...if you buy this book I hope it is for a wedding gift to a couple you do not like...

This book seems to be poorly constructed. Halfway through a one semester community college course, my copy is falling apart. About the content, I find it difficult to follow and suggest supplementing this text with Stallings, Operating Systems, 3rd ed.

Well first off being an applications programmer this book had alot of work to do to both make the topics interesting and understandable, well Mr. Nutt failed at both. The text is dry to say the least and often vague or incoherent. For example things are explained in methods such as "assume there 4 processes and no more are coming" well okay there bud. And every other reviewer has said it and I'm going to say it too, the labs are horrible! The objectives are vague the suggestions given are among the most convoluted ways to approach them, and the concepts and skills neccissary and no where to be found in the book.

Mr. Nutt is a terrible author. He teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder and it is also well known that he publishes an update every semester forcing his poor students to buy the new edition. As the other reviews pointed out, not only was this book poorly written it is poorly edited with an onslaught of errors. If you are a college teacher looking for a book to use in your Operating Systems class, DO NOT USE THIS BOOK, it is a concatenation of all the bad parts of other good books on Operating Systems.

Gary Nutt is incapable of writing. He is verbose and repetitive and spends a lot of time on pointless topics, such as notation for sets. Like so many mediocre authors, he fills the text with pseudo-mathematical notation to make it seem more sophisticated. The typesetting is deplorable, and I recommend he learn LaTeX.Nutt assumes the reader is a complete idiot. The book is an overview of the concepts of operating systems, which aren't remotely sophisticated. You will not learn anything practical about Operating Systems, and the concepts he covers are so trivial that you could learn in all in a day (once you extract them from the hundreds of pages or jargon and silly diagrams).I recommend "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation" by Andrew Tanenbaum and Al Woodhull instead of this trash.

I've been forced to buy this book and unfortunately using it for a month. The chapters are totaly inconprehensible, the information is scatered all over the book. He starts a subject, skip to another and get back to it a few chapters later. The problem sets are bogus. They ask about things that are not in the chapter and you can spend hours trying to figure out what he wants, just to find out after a few week that the answer is five chapter s later. The diagrams don't make sens whatsoever, some of them have so many lines you mistake them for abstract paintings. Don't try to use the code from the book, as it crashes all the time. Instead use the updates from Nutt's page, that also crash. The bottom line is : don't buy the book if you don't have to, and if you must, just copy the problem sets, because reading the book won't help you solve them. I would give this book 0 stars, but unfortunately it is not allowed.