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Search in Book Reviews

The ACCU passes on review copies of computer books to its members for them to review. The result is a large, high quality collection of book reviews by programmers, for programmers. Currently there are 1949 reviews in the database and more every month.
Search is a simple string search in either book title or book author. The full text search is a search of the text of the review.
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Title:
The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, Second Edition
Author:
Marshall McKusick, George Neville-Neil and Robert Watson
ISBN:
0321968972
Publisher:
Addison-Wesley (2015)
Pages:
928
Price:
£31.47
Reviewer:
Paul Floyd
Subject:
Appeared in:
31-4

About 10 years ago, I read the first edition of this book, and I quite enjoyed it. I’ve read a few books on OSes (Solaris, Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) and they tend to dwell on the details, either in the case of the open-source OSes describing the fields of kernel data structures or in the case of the closed source ones, trying to find ways to tell you as much about the data structures as possible with kernel debug tools. My main recollection from the first edition was that there was little in the way of data structures, it was mainly English prose. And that I quite enjoyed.

Fast forward to the second edition. Firstly we jump from FreeBSD 5.2 to FreeBSD 11 (which is not yet a production release). A lot of changes have happened in those 10 years. Virtualization, Security, ZFS and DTrace have all been added, which probably explains why the page count has gone up by about 200 pages (though the paper is thinner so the second edition is actually slightly thinner).

Unfortunately for me, much of this new material was either fairly familiar to me (e.g. the stuff that came from OpenSolaris like ZFS and DTrace) or isn’t really my cup of tea (like the security). That said, I quite enjoyed the book and if I do get the time to dabble a bit with FreeBSD then I expect that I’ll revisit the book.