From: John Regehr (regehr@cs.utah.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 02 2001 - 19:35:32 PST
> The Lions book is the best thing going for showing how a piece of
> small, well constructed code can do a complicated job. No question.
Tanenbaum's Minix book is also like this. Clear code, well-written
text.
On the other hand, I've recently been reading the new O'Reilly book
_Understanding the Linux Kernel_. It's good - quite a bit better than
any previous Linux internals book I've seen. However, I've been struck
by how difficult it would be to learn operating system fundamentals
using Linux code: nearly every part of the kernel is highly specialized
to particular usage patterns. Obfuscated code is everywhere: amortized
algorithms, sub-linear searches, and many, many heuristics that lack a
clear derivation or empirical basis.
John
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 02 2001 - 19:40:45 PST