O'Gorman, John
Description
The Grassroots series has been designed to meet the students needs. The books address core subjects, are concise and affordable. They provide the stud
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ent with enough resources and support, to pass a one semester course. Grassroots books have a common theme; they will inspire, educate and stimulate even the most reluctant of students. Macmillan Press, the Authors, and the series editor, Fintan Culwin are all working towards a standard of excellence which will enlighten and encourage the reader to extend their knowledge.
Operating Systems has a traditional arrangement of material. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to operating systems, and gives an overview of the rest of the book. Chapter 2 covers the traditional material on processes, but with more emphasis than usual on threads. Chapter 3 considers interactions between concurrent threads, including semaphores, message queues, and monitors. On the assumption that this is the only place where a student will meet concurency, it goes into the topic in some detail. Memory management is covered in Chapter 4, including segmentation and paging. Input/Output is dealt with over two chapters: Chapter 5 concentrates on the high-level, device independent aspects, while Chapter 6 looks at low-level aspects such as the interface with hardware, control of devices, and file organisation on disk. Chapter 7 introduces the reader to distributed computer systems, and goes into some detail on communication mechanisms, and various distributed services which can be built on top of these. Finally, Chapter 8 looks briefly at fault handling and security issues, in both stand-alone and distributed systems.
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