<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: mixed feelings
Review: If you want to learn how to write your own OS, this is the book for you! It answered all of the questions I ever had about writing an OS. It's the best book I've found for this type of development.
Rating: 
Summary: A wonderful book (and a show of tunnel vision on behalf
Review: of some of the reviewers here, carping about assembler, lack of "C wrappers" and Open Source.) The primary value of this book in my opinion is educational. It is not written in order to unseat the Evil Bill, nor to bless that section of the Open Source constituency that is composed of peabrained "radicals" with yet another toy platform in their endless quest of boundless ego inflation; mental soft-cocks will have to find other means of compensation of their latent inadequacies. (Btw, to those exceedingly smart on that page: any OS -- be it Bill's Windows or Linux or whatever else -- on some level is written in assembly, there's simply no other way to deal with the hardware, so learn first, and babble second, not the other way around. It's said, that to someone having a hammer, everything looks like a nail -- something for the 15 year-old linuxista half-wits, thinking they're great coz they know the word "C wrappers", to contemplate.) Who cares about any C wrappers in an educational book? Any moron can write C wrappers, the point is not to boost one's ego by producing yet another piece of crud boastfully called an operating system to list with five zillion similar, thoroughly ignored pieces on the google OS list; the point, rather, is to master that which usually goes beneath those wrappers! If one misses these damn wrappers, one is welcome to waste one's time writing them oneself instead of posting absurd drivel on amazon knocking down a great book. (Btw, I work with Linux a lot, so it's not a disparagement of linux or open source per se; these are simply different things. I think this is clear, but just in case I thought I'd clarify that.) If you want to learn how an OS is written -- specifically, practically, on a real processor, with real code, if you want to master assembly (not on some toy "utilites", but real, complex and highly functional code) -- get this book; if you work through it, you'll be a guru, and that will help you in your work no matter what it is, whether you want to build something on top of this OS, or deal with some other OS, Linux or whatever. This totally unique in its approach book is simply outstanding, no two ways about it.
Rating:
Summary: Not an educational textbook
Review: Some reviewers may fall back on the sorry excuse that this book is intended for educational purposes (because it does not examine a system being used by IT professionals). But my guess would be that these same reviewers must have ulterior motives ...because this book is, by no means, and educational textbook. What Burgess does, throughout the book, is basically dump code in your lap. There is no discussion of background theory, which is an absolute necessity when dealing with complicated topics like Intel Protected Mode and the 8259 Programmable Interrupt Controller (PIC). Instead, what he does is throw a bunch of source code at you (to pad the book's size) and then expect you to sift through everything line-by-line, with the expectation that you already know how PIC interrupt control words work, and that you understand how x386 segment descriptors work. There are a number of books on the Linux Kernel that do not suffer from these shortcomings. Specifically, the book by Bovet and Cesati does an amazing job of explaining all the little details (and don't think that this doesn't make a big difference, the devil is in the details). Check out Bovet's explanation of how Linux uses protected mode memory on Intel, it's well done. You can tell that PHDs like Bovet actually take pride in their work (unlike some two-dollar ex-technical school instructor who just expects you to learn by osmosis). Instructional text books are about lowering the learning threshold. The goal is to make a subject as easy to understand as possible. Burgess has not done that in this book. He hands you his code and then expects you to do the requisite foot-work. In this sense, this book is more of a poorly documented journal rather than something that an engineer would use to learn from. Documentation? Ha, that's a good one. If you're lucky, you might get cryptic one-line comments. The author admits, in certain points in the book, that his lack of documentation came back to haunt him (i.e. "I went back months later, only to realize that I forgot what I had done"). If Burgess worked for me writing software, I would have fired him. The reality of this book is that Burgess wrote an operating system because he had nothing better to do (he was retired). Retired people are like that; let's climb a mountain because it's there (what else am I going to do? Build a ship in a bottle? Watch TV?). However, once he completed the first cut, I suspect that he lost heart and decided to get a life. This book is his attempt to re-coup on the time he spent writing his own OS. Unfortunately, that's really all this book is. He took what he had and haphazardly crammed it into book format.
Rating:
Summary: Haste makes waste
Review: The idea behind this book is nice. It is a pity that the execution of that idea is so seriously lacking. After buying this book I felt like I had been a victim of false advertising. Most of the code in this book is in assembler. No C wrappers, nada. Good lord, any system engineer worth their salt knows that this is a ridiculous approach (from portability and maintenance perspectives). At least Tanenbaum had the decency to wrap his assembly code in C. For example, Tanenbaum's coding of the PC interrupt controller is much more lucid than Burgess', who offers a few one-liners. The interrupt controller is a specialized little chunk of hardware that is programmed at boot time with a series of 16-bit values. Burgess really should have offered a more complete explanation of how the interrupt controller works and why. Another problem that I have about the book is that it ties the reader to the Intel platform, and even then some of the Intel 80x86 details are seriously lacking (i.e. like protected mode memory setup and related alternatives). Why not write a book that gives a specific methodology for writing an OS (for any hardware platform) and then use Intel as a case study. If the book is about "building your own OS," then at least give the reader more options and a better trail guide so that they have feasible alternatives. In light of these kinds of issues, I would recommend Tanenbaum's MINIX book over this one. It seems to me that Burgess just sort of threw everything into the pot without really taking the time to rigorously explain the little details. Instead, he expects you to read the assembly code and figure it out. The only thing I can conclude is that he was rushing his book to publication at the expense of everything else. Haste makes waste bucko. If you want to see the insides of a production quality OS, then I would suggest Linux (there are volumes written on the kernel internals that go into much more detail than anything Burgess discusses, believe me). If you want a small "learning" OS, then I would recommend MINIX. If you want to look at a half-baked OS that some retired technical institute instructor wrote, and then abandoned as he realized he couldn't retire on the royalties, then... what the hell ...I would recommend buying this book. It's your money.
Rating:
Summary: Haste makes waste
Review: The one thing that seems to stand out in my mind is how the code seems to be thrown together without any regard for long term maintenance (i.e. assembly code isn't wrapped in C, most of the kernel is in x86 assembly code, doesn't seem to be any sort of structural design underpinning the different components, etc.). This is evident by the fact that the author often admits that he had problems remembering what he had done. If an overall design blueprints/metaphors had existed, he wouldn't have had this problem.
I assume that the author decided he would tackle his OS project and then get on with his life. In other words, let's get this done and then never, NEVER, look back (history seems to have verified this: the author wrote the OS in the early 1990s and then left MMURTL at the station with bus fair in the mid 1990s). There was no home-page on the internet, nor promoter outside of SAMs publishing. MMURTL did not take off. The hundreds of hours that the author spent building tools and wading around in the dark have been, for all intensive purposes, lost. All that remains is a jumbled book, as a testimony to one man's urge to climb a mountain "because it's there." Had Richard involved other people and Open-Sourced his creation, the man-power necessary to take MMURTL out of its confusing infantile state may have been available. Instead, Richard decided to build MMURTL utilizing a software team consisting of one person, and the rest is history. Those readers who want to dig into OS internals should defer to Linux. Unlike MMURTL, Linux is a "live" system (which admins actually use) with all the features you would expect in an enterprise OS. Linux has a sane design, does a sufficient job of isolating hardware specifics, and information/support can be located at dozens of web-sites. Best of all, Linus and his cast of thousands have wrapped the assembly code and given it a structural underpinning. At the end of the day, this book is a nice concept whose execution never really followed through. There may be one or two useful snippets of code, but I wouldn't invest 6 months of my life to become a MMURTL fanatic. History and evolution were the judges and Linux is the winner.
Rating:
Summary: A "Walkthrough" for OS Development...Cool!
Review: This book (er, CD) is wonderful. I corrected myself because itonly seems to be available for order in CD format (acrobat *.PDF)online at Richard Burgess takes you step by step through his efforts to develop a working OS (called MMURTL). The approach is unique for an OS text. He packs more than just theory and concepts into this book. He also shows you how to put them into practice. I'm only about halfway through the book. I bought the electronic version about two weeks ago and cannot put it down (or turn it off in the case with the CD). If you want to see a different approach to OS development and you are not afraid of C code or Assembly language, then give this book a read. You won't be disappointed. Oh, one more thing, the electronic version of this book is half the price of the original SAMs edition and worth every penny.
Rating:
Summary: Where to purchase this book (and PDF) online...
Review: This book (under the name "MMURTL V1.0") can be found on Sensory Publishing's website:http://www.sensorypublishing.com/mmurtl.htmlYou can purchase a PDF of the book (and the source of the OS itself), or pay extra for a printed copy in addition to the PDF. (My original review was truncated before the URL for some reason.)
<< 1 >>
| 
