Operating Systems: A Spiral Approach

Elmasri, Levine, and Carrick’s “spiral approach” to teaching operating systems develops student understanding of various OS components early on and helps students approach the more difficult aspects of operating systems with confidence. While operating systems have changed dramatically over the years, most OS books use a linear approach that covers each individual OS component in depth, which is difficult for students to follow and requires instructors to constantly put materials in context.

Elmasri, Levine, and Carrick do things differently by following an integrative or “spiral” approach to explaining operating systems. The spiral approach alleviates the need for an instructor to “jump ahead” when explaining processes by helping students “completely” understand a simple, working, functional system as a whole in the very beginning. This is more effective pedagogically, and it inspires students to continue exploring more advanced concepts with confidence.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Operating Systems Overview and Background
Chapter 1: Getting Started
Chapter 2: Operating System Concepts, Components,and Architectures

Part 2: Building Operating Systems Incrementally: A Breadth-Oriented Spiral Approach
Chapter 3: A Simple, Single-Process Operating System
Chapter 4: A Single-User Multitasking Operating System
Chapter 5: A Single-User Multitasking/Multithreading Operating System
Chapter 6: A Multiple-User Operating System
Chapter 7: Parallel and Distributed Computing, Clusters,and Grids

Part 3: CPU and Memory Management
Chapter 8: Process Management: Concepts, Threads, and Scheduling
Chapter 9: More Process Management: Interprocess Communication, Synchronization, and Deadlocks
Chapter 10: Basic Memory Management
Chapter 11: Advanced Memory Management

Part 4: A Depth-Oriented Presentation of OS Concepts: Files Systems and Input/Output
Chapter 12: File Systems—Basics
Chapter 13: File Systems—Examples and More Features
Chapter 14: Disk Scheduling and Input/Output Management

Part 5: Networks, Distributed Systems, and Security
Chapter 15: Introduction to Computer Networks
Chapter 16: Protection and Security
Chapter 17: Distributed Operating Systems

Part 6: Case Studies
Chapter 18: Windows NT? through Vista?
Chapter 19: Linux: A Case Study
Chapter 20: Palm OS: A Class Case Study