This book has all the right material (and more). I found the topics to be presented in a straightforward and easy to understand manner just as most here have said. There's even a glossary and a list of acronyms provided which is a helpful tool. What else could you want? I would highly recommend checking this one out. Oh, and the couple naysay blurbs here are nonsensical as this has got to be one of the best books in its class.

Let's face it ... the IT market is near the bottom. A colleague (or should I say former colleague) handed me this book to 'freshen' up before that all important interview. It was quick and easy to read and helped me put some meat behind what I had been doing as well as articulate and formalize my knowledge. I think this is exactly what gave me the edge in the interviews (endless rounds of interviews). Now I not only landed but went from a senior engineer to a chief architect with a bump in pay. I just grabbed a copy for myself as I'm sure this is one book I will be referring to quite often. All in all - content wise I'd highly recommend this book. On the part of editing - well - not the best but the content is what I needed and got.

RW
Chief Architect

While this book covers a lot of the areas pertaining to distributed OSes, it is very tersely worded and I have to wonder what monkey edited it. At least 1/2 of the pages contain grammatical errors. Figures are also stunningly frequently mislabeled. There is no way anyone should use this book until these errors are fixed for either a text or their own information.

Contentwise, the book assumes that you remember everything from your basic OS class, it doesn't explain ANYTHING that would normally be covered by a more basic OS book. This doesn't cut the mustard because not every professor covers every topic relating to normal OSes in Intro to OS(also, this book may be used at the masters level where it is possible that its been 10 years since the student has taken intro to os). It may be ok for a quickie reference into possible algorithms, but as an actual learning guide it stinks.

Sadly, I can't give this 0 stars.

Let me tell you, I bought this book after seeing the author speak at N+I in Las Vegas and boy am I glad I did. Refreshingly different, it was not only clear and to the point but practical as well. It was easy to tell Galli has been there and done it and it really helped me get it. Some books are so fluffy and try to bury you in useless theory without relating it to what we need to know when we design and develop real systems in the Internet space. Not this one. As a bonus, the glossary and acronym list was quite helpful since I didn't have to figure out where the word was defined when I jumped to a topic using the index. Great for spot reading.

On a school note, I took a course for my M.S. that used the Tanenbaum book. This overall was much more helpful. Actually some of my classmates couldn't figure out why I knew what was going on in class so quickly. I would say, scrap the class book and grab this one. Sure there are some typos as people mentioned in their reviews but at least the material can readily be understood. If only other computer authors could be understood this easily.

JMHO.

The trouble with a book like this is that it expects you to just know, somehow, perhaps by intuition, what a term or name means. Really good authors like Andrew Tanenbaum relate the concepts to each other gradually, and to real world ideas. This is what I mean that Galli's book has no analogies. "This is like this, but not like this..." After reading just a few paragraphs, my head is swimming with undefined names and unresolved references. The end result is utter frustration and no deep understanding of anything. This book looks good but looks are SOOOOO deceiving! Don't waste your time with it.