From: Tony Finch (dot@dotat.at)
Date: Tue Jan 02 2001 - 16:29:09 PST
"Robert S. Thau" <rst@ai.mit.edu> wrote:
>
>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.
>
>But in order to appreciate it, you need to understand the job that the
>code is doing, at the level of the Unix (v6) system-call API and (at
>least very roughly) the underlying hardware --- if you've just never
>been told, for instance, that the same numerical memory address refers
>to different words of memory depending on the state of the processor,
>or why, then the considerable body of code in Unix v6 which manages
>those translations will be completely obscure, and Lions won't help
>much because he assumes you already know.
I would say you don't need to know any Unix in order to appreciate it,
and that was probably the state of the students it was written for.
Its best use is as a practical reinforcement for an OS fundamentals
course, so the students should already have covered paging and so
forth.
Tony.
-- f.a.n.finch fanf@covalent.net dot@dotat.at "Then they attacked a town. A small town, I'll admit. But nevertheless a town of people. People who died."
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