Structure of the Book

The first two chapters ("Concepts and Tools," and "System Architecture") lay the foundation with terms and concepts used throughout the rest of the book. The next three chapters "System Mechanisms," "Management Mechanisms," and "Startup and Shutdown" describe key underlying mechanisms in the system. The next eight chapters explain the core components of the operating system: processes, threads, and jobs; memory management; security; the I/O system; storage management; the cache manager; file systems; and networking. The last chapter covers crash dump analysis.