Re: books on programming

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From: John Regehr (regehr@cs.utah.edu)
Date: Wed Jan 03 2001 - 09:56:30 PST


> Unfortunately, the worst thing about the Minix book is probably Minix
> itself, with its microkernel architecture, which was the academic fad
> at the time it was written, but has fallen out of vogue for some
> pretty good reasons.

Right. However, I still think Minix is a good teaching OS - the
microkernel encourages writing modular code, which is a good thing even
if the modules don't exist at run time. It's a lot more straightforward
to apply Minix experience to Linux (or whatever) than it is to apply
Scheme experience to C (or whatever), IMO.

> Hmmm... if you really wanted to go for something more modern than
> Lions, a good first approach might be one of the xBSD kernels, in
> conjunction with the Leffler et al. book on the design of 4.3 BSD
> (though there's been enough change at all levels since 4.3 that a
> book that old will be an imperfect guide to recent releases).

The newer version of this book, which describes 4.4BSD, is quite good.

John


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