For years, finding the right textbook for IT or systems courses was a lost cause. Until now, anyway.
Does this sound familiar? Each semester I found myself adjusting my Operating Systems courses around the “best available” textbook, even when it did not quite fit my students’ needs. Too often, that meant adapting a traditional computer science text for an Information Technology curriculum. We would use about a third of it while supplementing it with my own materials to try and make it work.
Operating Systems Concepts for Information Technology was created to fill that gap. When Great River Learning approached me about developing a digital resource designed for the course, rather than forcing the course to fit the book, I saw an opportunity to finally create something practical, relevant, and built specifically for IT students.
This digital publication grew out of course notes I developed and refined over the years along with decades of practical industry experience. It was critical to emphasize clarity, engagement, and practical application for my students and the following features accomplished this:
Please consider reviewing this publication and sharing your feedback on possibly adopting this for your own operations systems course. Feel free to contact me directly with any technical questions about the text.
Sincerely, James F. Holdener Author
P.S. I knew I was on the right track when I received this feedback from a former student: “When I was in college, my information technology textbooks were pretty much disposable. Once in a blue moon, there would be a book or a class that would teach core concepts and fundamentals that have continued to be useful in my career. James’s class was one of these sources. James focused on the real-world elements of modern computing platforms and understands the value of practical approaches and timeless core concepts. In this book James has keyed important information that will remain in my engineering toolkit for the rest of my life.”
Part I Introduction
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Hardware Overview
Chapter 3 Microprocessor Overview
Chapter 4 Operating System Overview
Part 2 Operating System Components
Chapter 5 Input Output Device Manager
Chapter 6 Secondary Memory
Chapter 7 File System
Chapter 8 Memory Manager
Part 3 Computation Management
Chapter 10 Process Manager
Chapter 11 Process Coordination
Chapter 12 Process Scheduling
Part 4 Special Topics in Operating System
Chapter 16 Specialty Operating Systems
Summary
Appendix A Annotated Books
Appednd B Example Laboratories