Rating: 
Summary: Practical Magic in Win32
Review: This is the book to take with you if you are expelled to deserted island with 1 laptop, solar power generator, win32 sdk/ddk, and 1 book of choice. It will make you think, wonder, appreciate and grok the best OS that Microsoft can offer. As Matt Pietrek said once, the magic of being debugger guru is the better understanding of OS. If there is any book to help you become one, this is it.What is very important also is that along the line Mark (and David) explain and teach the reverse engineering techniques to explore the surrounding world of unknown black-box software. The books if full of ideas, hints and tips on multiple ways how to peek under the hood and extract that piece of information you are looking for. It made me to fully understand and re-think the implications of thread scheduling, memory management, paging and synchronization on the complex code I was working with and resulted in great performance improvements. You will also get to see the elegance of design decisions and compromises made by engineers working on such a complex OS, and this enlightening experience alone justifies reading of the book even if you are not interested in Win32 in any way. It is incredible amount of knowledge and hard work compressed in a single volume.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent comprehensive overview
Review: When I first heard that Russinovich was teaming with Solomon to do the 3rd edition of this book, I knew the potential of what this book could be. Now that I have it, I can firmly say that it surpasses every one of my expectations. Solomon and Russinovich do a great job covering all grounds well. Topics range from the extremely low level of boot process, device drivers, exceptions, and page tables to the high level structures of the object manager, file systems, and cache management. Odd topics such as networking and security complete the discussion. This book is an excellent complement to Richter's Programming Applications book, with very little overlapping content. It is so complete, in fact, that it could almost be used as a blueprint to clone Windows, if one so desired. This book is very light on code and very heavy on diagrams and tables. It is so clearly written that turning the information into usable code should be a breeze. If I had to complain, there is a lack of native application discussion. But this is pushing it, as the sysinternals web site is included on CD and includes this material.
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