Rating:  Summary: Mostly well done...lacking in some areas Review: The book is well done. There's no way you could please everyone when attempting to explain the kernel of an OS, but I thought they did an outstanding job. It makes "grepping" through the source much more pleasant and understandable. Chapters 1 through 3 present the flow of processes in Linux and introduce the operation of system calls, wait queues,etc. The chapter on the file system was very well done, however, the chapter on memory management left me with more questions than answers...it needs a little more work. The book requires a pretty good knowledge of C and some prior knowledge of OS's in general.
Rating:  Summary: Vauge Review: The stuff in this book is explained in a complex manner. Though it is well organised it lacks clear representation. It looks like linux man-pages are explained in an organised manner. Could be used as a reference book, but not for learning.
Rating:  Summary: A liitle out-date, but still a good book for OS concepts Review: This book is a little outdated today as it covers the older 2.0 kernels. If you are reading this book and following it up on a 2.4 kernel you will find many changes.The book does contain the source code of the reference kernel it is written on.I suppose its time a new updated edition is published. However the commentry on a older kernel does not reduce the value of this book. It is a good book to understand the OS concepts as applied to Linux kernel.This book can be a good companion to Silberschatz/Galvin's "Operating Systems Concept" in a college course. Another value of this book is purely historical, in case someone desires to compare older and newer kernels with a high-level view.
Rating:  Summary: Not recommended for educational purpose Review: This book is lacked of organization. Some of the concepts are so vague because of the POOR English tone.
Rating:  Summary: Good for those who know theory and wants to know practise. Review: This book is not concerned with too much theory.
It has a lot of code lines and a lot of informations on kernel programming. One should be used to all theory behind Operating Systems concept and PC hardware. The book fails to explain in greater detail some crucial informations. Some features and codifications are out of date, but the overall idea is explained. There are examples on implementing new features and they help a lot if one is planning on modifing the kernel. It is "must" to kernel hackers.
Rating:  Summary: Decent Review: This book is quite adequate to get down to kernel hacking. There are certain things missing in this book, but it makes a good starting point -- I wouldn't call it a great starting point, though. If you have a background of the Unix Kernel, this book will be easier to get along with.
Rating:  Summary: Poorly written and organized, too vague Review: This book was quite disappointing. I don't feel that I learned anything that I couldn't have learned in a similar amount of time spent by reading through source code. What's worse, the book wasn't any better at presenting that information. I give some credit for not resorting to simply printing the kernel sources in bound format as other books have done, but apart from that, there's not much good to say here. First off, the authors' command of the English language, as presented in final form by the book's editorial staff, leaves much to be desired. The prose is very conversational and awkward, and although generally understandable (words are strung together in grammatical correctness), the text doesn't clearly present ideas. Second, the book suffers from a lack of clear focus on a specific reader. At times, very detailed descriptions of things like slow/fast IRQ handling are discussed, but then at other times the authors spend a great deal of time talking about the specific quirks of the 8253 timer chip in the ISA PC architecture. I would have preferred if the majority of this book were discussing the ideas involved in the Linux kernel design, but it wanders in and out of describing things that most readers who would buy the book based on its title already know. Finally, in general the book is vague just when you'd want it to be specific, in describing the way things really fit together in the Linux kernel. They've attempted to simplify the explanations of complicated, optimized subroutines, and that's great, bt in dissecting everything into little pieces, I'm left with a very small picture of how the whole system actually fits together. As if all this weren't enough, the book is really only 300pp of useful information. About 100 of the other 180 are spent on Appendix A, a useless (but book-filling) reference to the specifics of all the system calls implemented in Linux. It's bound to be out of date and the information is of a very cookie-cutter nature anyway, and it's better left out. The remaining 80pp go to equally worthless Apendices and the Index. By way of comparison, I recently finished reading "Inside Windows 2000, 3rd ed.", a book with a very similar goal and subject domain. The difference is night and day. The authors of that book obviously went to great pains to make extrememly complicated subsystems (which, incidentally are much better than Linux, in most all cases) comprehensible. I shudder to think about how bad the FIRST edition of Linux Kernel Internals must have been. If you're absolutely desperate for something --anything-- that describes the Linux Kernel, I suppose this is a reasonable place to start, but otherwise, I wouldn't waste your money here.
Rating:  Summary: A good book on Linux kernel Review: This is a good book on the Linux kernel. It does'nt explain every line, it would'nt be possible, but shows you the paths trough the kernel. It is also up to date : it covers the 2.2 kernel. A must together with Rusling and Rubini for everyone serious about Linux.
Rating:  Summary: Techy Cool Review: This is the best book (there aren't that many actually) out there on the UNIX kernal. It is very technical and should only be read by someone who has experiance with UNIX or is very smart
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