Think

(working through more Hacker News backlog)

I just finished Think OS: A Brief Introduction to Operating Systems. It had been sitting in my browser for quite some time now and I decided to read through the book this afternoon.

The book stays true to its title and gives a short and sweet introduction to (some) OS and systems programming fundamentals. While it doesn’t dive deep into any topic (for example — TLBs are not mentioned in the chapter about Virtual Memory) it does a good job of laying a foundation for people who have never taken a systems programming / OS course before and are trying to gain an understanding of the fundamentals. That being said there are links to resources (like an explanation on how dlmalloc is implemented) scattered throughout the book that allow the reader to gain a deeper understanding of the topic at hand.

If you’ve never done any systems programming before and are looking to write some low level code this book is a good place to begin to understand how the OS and kernel work. If you’re looking for something more in-depth I’d highly recommend reading Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces.