Operating Systems: Principles and Practice

Over the past two decades, there has been a huge amount of innovation in both the principles and practice of operating systems Over the same period, the core ideas in a modern operating system - protection, concurrency, virtualization, resource allocation, and reliable storage - have become widely applied throughout computer science. Whether you get a job at Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or any other leading-edge technology company, it is impossible to build resilient, secure, and flexible computer systems without the ability to apply operating systems concepts in a variety of settings. This book examines the both the principles and practice of modern operating systems, taking important, high-level concepts all the way down to the level of working code. Because operating systems concepts are among the most difficult in computer science, this top to bottom approach is the only way to really understand and master this important material.

Thomas Anderson is the Robert E. Dinning Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, where he has been teaching computer science since 1997. Professor Anderson has been widely recognized for his work, receiving the Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching, the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award, the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award, the USENIX Software Tools User Group Award, the IEEE Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize, the NSF Presidential Faculty Fellowship, and the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He is an ACM Fellow. He has served as program co-chair of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference and program chair of the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). In 2003, he helped co-found the USENIX/ACM Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI). Professor Anderson's research interests span all aspects of building practical, robust, and efficient computer systems, including operating systems, distributed systems, computer networks, multiprocessors, and computer security. Over his career, he has authored or co-authored over one hundred peer-reviewed papers; eighteen of his papers have won best paper awards. Michael Dahlin is a Principal Engineer at Google. Prior to that, from 1996 to 2014, he was a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas in Austin, where he taught operating systems and other subjects as and where he was awarded the College of Natural Sciences Teaching Excellence Award. Professor Dahlin's research interests include Internet- and large-scale services, fault tolerance, security, operating systems, distributed systems, and storage systems. Professor Dahlin's work has been widely recognized. Over his career, he has authored over seventy peer reviewed papers; ten of which have won best paper awards. He is both an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow, and he has received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and an NSF CAREER award. He has served as the program chair of the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), co-chair of the USENIX/ACM Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), and co-chair of the International World Wide Web conference (WWW).