FreeDOS Kernel; An MS-DOS Emulator for Platform Independence and Embedded Systems Development

Rating:
Summary: Excellent text from many perspectives.
Review: The author really made the text flow by providing a high level view and then peeling back each layer to reveal the working of the kernel. In addition, he judiciously intermixed, text (historical, theoretical, practical, opinions) with diagrams, and code segments, which made the book easy to read, and concepts easy to follow.

The code was written in a clean and consistant style, amply annotated with comments which explain what the code does, as opposed to just paraphrasing it. A student or inexperienced "C" coder will see the practical uses of portability techniques, ifdef debugs, type defs, etc., which are frequently ignored in academic works.

Lastly, I'm glad the author resisted the current trend of dumping everything but the kitchen sink into a text just to see how much shelf space he could take up (most professionals are to busy for that nonsense). This is a nuts-and-bolts approach; what are the concepts, why is done, how is done, here's the code (and its all on a companion disk).

If your looking to learn about DOS, kernel implementations, or some good "C" code examples/idioms, this book is highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Ok if you have borland C++.....
Review: This book was ok, but you need borland C++ unless you want to do some major porting... The back said that you only need borland OR microsoft c, but that is a lie. The only reasion I gave it a 4 was becouse of this. You could tell that a program wrote it and not an author. If you want a book on os programing get it

Rating:
Summary: Good to Excellent
Review: This is my second pass on this book.And each pass gives more pleasure.Excellently designed while obeying ms-dos compatability.Excellent explanations.Highly commented programs.I have got the overall picture.But the f-node related functions are somehow harder to understand and needs more explanation.I have made pass 1 on Podanoffsky's dissecting dos.This book is much better than the latter.If there had been a table showing the functions and the files they are in it would have been better. I am looking for a similar book on a multiprogramming OS and as easy to grasp as this one.