I thought it would be fun / informative to post the covers of the history Operating System Concepts. The general name for the series is “the dinosaur book” although the covers have included non-dinos as well. As far as we know this series is the best-selling operating system textbook.
The critters on the cover indicate both the evolution of operating systems and the ongoing “OS wars”. I became a co-author on this book in its Third Edition, after it was well established as one of the leading operating systems textbooks by James Peterson and Avi Silberschatz. Over time Peterson went on to other things and Avi and I were joined by Greg Gagne. The First Edition was published in 1983 and was 548 pages long. On its cover were dinosaurs and mammals labeled with the names of the important operating systems of the time, including OS/360, Multics, Scope, OS/MVS, VMS, UNIX, and CP/M. The book was a break-through because it covered not one operating system but abstracted key operating system features and used specific operating systems to illustrate those concepts. This method is still the one employed in the current edition. The Second Edition went disco with the same dinos and mammals but this time lit up in neon. The Third Edition updated the creatures and showed the following operating systems on the cover: OS/MVS, Multics, VMS, UNIX, OS/2, Mach, and MS-DOS. For the Fourth Edition we decided to stop labeling the animals on the cover, but on the inside of the cover we had descriptions of the animals as well as a time-line of operating system evolution. I thought that was cool. The same theme was in the Fifth Edition as well. The Sixth Edition had the animal information but stopped including the timeline. Along the way we published alternate versions of the book that used Java as the descriptive language and for exercises and projects. For more information on the current OSC, including sample exercises, errata, and teaching aids, check out the text home page.
Peter Baer Galvin's Blog 
March 29, 2007 at 4:54 pm
This is the best of explanations of all the OS buzz words and technologies I have come across in years. Great work.
June 26, 2007 at 10:43 pm
Dear sir,
I am a Lecturer and Operating System Teaching , have about 80 students in my class.
I want the Textbook or ebook from you so
for efficeincy study in this subject
Best regards ,
Anop P.
November 11, 2007 at 4:47 am
Dear Sir,
I have been working in the university since 1991. I have been teaching OS from your book. It is simply simple and beautiful covering all concepts. This is the best book i think so.
With regards
Rama Mohan Reddy Ambati
Professor and Head
Department of Computer Science and engineering
November 15, 2007 at 11:18 pm
It’s so cool,it help us a lot,,,great job….
November 15, 2007 at 11:22 pm
actually where using your books,,,everytime we have research,,,and my professor also recommend it too….
January 13, 2008 at 10:49 pm
hi.. wats the reason for dinos in the book. i really cant get the correct answer. pls can u tell us
January 26, 2008 at 12:46 am
It’s an excellent book.
March 11, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Hi. The old cover reminded me of the college days. This was my favourite subject and m still fascinated by the myriad features of any OS. This book describes the concepts so simply that the subject becomes interesting. Thanks for the great work.
April 13, 2008 at 2:36 am
Just wanna know the reason why the authors of OS covered the OS books in dinosaur?
April 16, 2008 at 9:30 pm
it’s history dude…dinos use computer too 😛
May 12, 2008 at 2:54 pm
i don’t read it yet i think it will be cool.
May 13, 2008 at 1:00 pm
I have been teaching operating system courses since 2000, first at Linkoping University, Sweden, and currently at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. All the time I use your book as the text book.
This is a great book for learning and teaching. Hard OS concepts have been explained nicely to be easy to understand and teach. Good work. Keep it up.
Abdil Rashid Mohamed
July 10, 2008 at 9:21 am
The seventh edition of this textbook is being used in the OS course which I happen to be taking second semester 2008 at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. Nice choice of textbook!
I have the fifth edition (and lots of other OS books, and resources I’ve found on the web) because I’ve been interested in OSes since I was a teenager (I’m now 28) and I have found these texts to be very readable and actually do teach OS Concepts.
Finally, a book that actually does go a little into hardware and other areas you don’t normally get to see, like file systems in more depth, not just endless chapters on scheduling and memory management algorithms. There’s even material on security in OSes and multimedia systems.
These books are highly readable and I’d recommend them for the beginner as well as those who have a few other books and resources such as hardware datasheets, the Intel or AMD manuals, etc., and plan to write an OS.
I also found the appendices describing other systems very inspiring, and I would encourage those who want to actually write a new OS to read these appendices. Yes, even read the ones on Windows 2000 and XP. 🙂
The main gripe I have with these textbooks is the lack of a CD with some “lab course” software so we can hack out a little kernel and get a user environment up and running like a kernel that fork()s a shell and you have to implement the shell as well as the kernel and some user programs, and attempt to port across some POSIX programs (practice with implementing system calls and a lot more).
There is also a complete lack of concrete information on actually writing a kernel. I know this would be difficult, but a few chapters pointing students in the right direction would be helpful. Start with choosing a kernel (make sure we stick with our design; perhaps a “simple” UNIX 6 or 7 which can be downloaded from The Unix Heritage Society tuhs.org), processor manuals, booting (use the x86 because they’re everywhere and cheap), finding the hardware with a recursive bus walk and printing out device and function IDs, writing a driver for the keyboard, writing a console driver for printing to the screen, docs like the ATA/ATAPI, SCSI and SATA docs for a disk driver, the gotchas along the way like enabling the A20 line (although modern SuperIO chipsets do this), programming the PIC (the IBM/Intel misunderstanding!), the VESA BIOS Extension 3 docs for colour text and graphics modes, and so on.
Aside from the very practical side of things, these books are superb and right up there with Comer’s XINU book (PC Edition is the one you want) and Tanenbaum’s Minix book.
Other good books are: The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System (McKusick), UNIX File Systems (Pate), the Lions Commentary on Unix 6th Edition with Source Code by John Lions (“The Lions Book”), Virtual Machine Design and Implementation in C/C++ (Blunden), Understanding the Linux Kernel (Cesati), Linux Kernel Development (Love) and Linux Kernel Internals (Beck). There are others.
Of course, there’s the OSDev forums (http://forum.osdev.org/) and the Bona Fide OS site (http://www.osdever.net/) with tutorials and datasheets and such.
Good luck to all students!
August 5, 2008 at 12:37 am
Hi! I am a student at a 2-year public college in the U.S. Unfortunately, computer courses over here tend to just teach the basics over and over. (For example, our 2 OS classes just taught how to use the Windows GUI and about basic management and using performance utilities.)
Even some of our later classes really only teach “computer literacy” (my description) topics, in one way or another. Class content never seems to live up to the description.
So I am so happy I bought this book, and am learning things on my own. It is written so clearly it is easy to understand, at least in concept.
I tend to absorb concepts better than details. So I am trying to finish the book between classes, then I can flip through the book a second time and do the exercises.
I can’t emphasize enough how well-written this is. Even if all you have is some minor text-oriented programming under your belt, as long as you are fluent in computer terminology, you will understand this book!
I recommend to download and print the appendices and go to Staples to have them bound for easy reading. (Not to be confused with making copies! That’s a no-no!) It only costs a couple bucks. Then you can keep them on your shelf next to the textbook, or look at them while you are coding!
I only wish I could take a class like this at college.
August 5, 2008 at 12:42 am
@ James Buchanan:
Another good book (from reviews on Amazon) is Linux Device Drivers. Maybe that would be useful for your teaching plans.
It’s on my to-get list, though I don’t have time to touch it yet.
September 20, 2008 at 12:58 pm
operating systems curriculum and this textbook need to take the next step –
help future developers of large systems decide on whether to delegate tasks to the operating system or build custom implementations. for example, should I use linux’s memory manager or should I allocate a huge block of memory and write my own, given a set of requirements of a large, high performance system.
yes, you can’t skip the principles, but they need to be compressed. i believe that if operating systems classes taught students how to face applicable questions such as that above, then the principles would stick. if the students then wanted to go back later in their career / studies to dig deeper, give the challenges of applying a given concept, they could and would be more motivated.
i also wonder if there could be more integration with the software engineering class, where one of the early phases in designing a system would be to select which portions of an operating system are being re-implemented in the system you are building and how many of those portions should actually delegate to the os’s services. or even a third path, start your custom implementation of an os service with a portion of linux, then modify code to fit your needs.
the one controversial idea here might be tying a system to a particular operating system. in reality, i believe most of the large systems in use run on cheap servers that can freely install whatever operating system is needed. OS independence just gives you less performance or more complexity, in exchange for a flexibility of installation that really isn’t necessary presently.
i find every part of an operating system interesting, and the walk through of how the principles of an operating system are used in practice interesting. I just feel that these concepts will quickly leave my mind within a year or two, if there isn’t a strong enough bridge between concepts and my everyday needs as a software developer.
October 23, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Best O.S. book ever, thanks
November 5, 2008 at 1:48 am
hi i am priya ghorpade i have suffcient in all topisc but plz give me information in sixth edition in operating system bcoz some problem in topics
November 7, 2008 at 3:37 am
Great book Sir…
I’ve read some other well-known books concerning OSs but your book stands above the rest.The flow of the conceptual ideas make this book much like a grippling story-book.
A lil bit improvement is expected in diagrams.Some more illustrative diagrams are expected from my side.
Anyways,thanks for writing this book painstakingly ….
November 7, 2008 at 10:26 am
Thanks all for the comments.
Prakash,
We will consider your suggestions for the next edition. Other suggestions welcome.
November 18, 2008 at 11:29 am
Great Book Sir.I’m going to teach OS Applications at our school.And i’m going to use it in my class. This is was also the book that we are using when i was still a student.But we used the older edition. Thanks a lot sir..
November 19, 2008 at 1:10 pm
I was always wondering about it….Thanx you gave me the answer 🙂
December 17, 2008 at 1:12 am
[…] spending some time searching for the answer on the net,I found this answer.It was originally posted here , so I thought of posting the same for my readers […]
December 17, 2008 at 1:24 am
[…] spending some time searching for the answer on the net,I found this answer.It was originally posted here , so I thought of posting the same for my readers […]
January 27, 2009 at 1:10 pm
This book is used also in ths OS course of Computer science’s Perugia (Italy)
nice book…..
ps: 30/30! 😀