Not an educational textbook

Some reviewers may fall back on the sorry excuse that this book is intended for educational purposes (because it does not examine a system being used by IT professionals). But my guess would be that these same reviewers must have ulterior motives ...because this book is, by no means, and educational textbook.

What Burgess does, throughout the book, is basically dump code in your lap. There is no discussion of background theory, which is an absolute necessity when dealing with complicated topics like Intel Protected Mode and the 8259 Programmable Interrupt Controller (PIC). Instead, what he does is throw a bunch of source code at you (to pad the book's size) and then expect you to sift through everything line-by-line, with the expectation that you already know how PIC interrupt control words work, and that you understand how x386 segment descriptors work.

There are a number of books on the Linux Kernel that do not suffer from these shortcomings. Specifically, the book by Bovet and Cesati does an amazing job of explaining all the little details (and don't think that this doesn't make a big difference, the devil is in the details). Check out Bovet's explanation of how Linux uses protected mode memory on Intel, it's well done.

You can tell that PHDs like Bovet actually take pride in their work (unlike some two-dollar ex-technical school instructor who just expects you to learn by osmosis).

Instructional text books are about lowering the learning threshold. The goal is to make a subject as easy to understand as possible. Burgess has not done that in this book. He hands you his code and then expects you to do the requisite foot-work. In this sense, this book is more of a poorly documented journal rather than something that an engineer would use to learn from.

Documentation? Ha, that's a good one. If you're lucky, you might get cryptic one-line comments. The author admits, in certain points in the book, that his lack of documentation came back to haunt him (i.e. "I went back months later, only to realize that I forgot what I had done"). If Burgess worked for me writing software, I would have fired him.

The reality of this book is that Burgess wrote an operating system because he had nothing better to do (he was retired). Retired people are like that; let's climb a mountain because it's there (what else am I going to do? Build a ship in a bottle? Watch TV?). However, once he completed the first cut, I suspect that he lost heart and decided to get a life. This book is his attempt to re-coup on the time he spent writing his own OS. Unfortunately, that's really all this book is. He took what he had and haphazardly crammed it into book format.

Other Reviews

• What you need to Consider
• I like it!
• Lots of reviewers missing the point
• Not an educational textbook
• Haste makes waste