Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces

A great book on operating systems and a very fun read! I love the little snippets of humour the authors have put in here — they really make the content more approachable. As for the content, the book covers a vast range of topics in Virtualisation, Concurrency, and Persistence (with some additional stuff on Distributed Computing). The level of depth is appropriate for the length of the book and the authors give you a whole host of references at the end of each chapter along with little descriptions of each so you can study whatever topic interests you further. The code in the book is written in C, so it may feel dated, especially as it relates to concurrency (C++ has a better concurrency library), but overall is quite helpful if you want to see what the implementation of a certain functionality would look like. TLDR: 5/5 would recommend. I read this book cover to cover and will get started with the end-of-chapter exercises very soon. Money well spent. 😁

I needed a book to complement my Operating Systems course at university and OSTEP is working fantastically. It's written in a friendly, accessible manner and goes into just about the right amount of detail you'd expect, with easily-understandable code to accompany each concept. The "Three Easy Pieces" are defined as: 1) virtualisation 2) concurrency and 3) data persistency. What I like about the book is that these "pieces" are all rather self-contained, so if you need to jump between one topic to the next, you're perfectly capable of doing so. There's no obligation to read from start to finish, imo. One minor minor thing to watch out for (which is really not such a huge deal) is that some of the code examples have lines capitalised. I'm assuming this was done automatically by whatever word processor used to publish the book. But it's easily spotted if you understand typical programming conventions.

Super nice book. I'm not an "operating systems" expert, so for me this book has an amazing way of teaching you the OS basics. Super nice for people who want to start going deeper into OS details.

OS introduced in a very easy-to-understand manner for students and professionals alike, and organised in three easy pieces virtualization, concurrency and persistence. The book is also at a very affordable price, well worth it!

Great book that introduces the mystery of operating systems in a fun yet challenging way. What makes this book stand out is that it is written a one story and you explore the different aspects of operating systems together with the author. I introduced this book as the course literature in our undergraduate course at KTH a year and I'm very satisfied.

The book's content seems to be quite good - unfortunately, it is almost unreadable on my Nexus Kindle app. There are no options to modify font or text size or line spacing. The text is very tightly packed and very difficult to read on my device (presume this will be the case on any tablet). I thought at least I will use the Amazon cloud reader - but the book is not available to read on the Cloud reader either. To top it all, the print book is not available for immediate purchase. This is my first such experience on Kindle books.

Great book

Great contents. Written well, reads well. Physical book itself is mediocre. Medium size book itself but huge borders mean the printed pages are small. Page quality differs within the bind too - odd. Boring cover. Find a better distributor

The authors have generously made this book available for free, which is reason enough to purchase a copy to support them. Unfortunately the binding is of the poorest quality and the spine will certainly break when stressed, which means you will start collecting loose pages very soon.

A little hard to read(small font size) and sometimes difficult to understand. Take your time to read it and at the end you will understand what OS is and how it works.

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).