---
product_id: 91903968
title: "Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces"
price: "₱5422"
currency: PHP
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reviews_count: 13
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---

# Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces

**Price:** ₱5422
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- **What is this?** Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces
- **How much does it cost?** ₱5422 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.ph](https://www.desertcart.ph/products/91903968-operating-systems-three-easy-pieces)

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## Description

OSTEP ("oh step"), or the "the comet book", represents the culmination of years of teaching intro to operating systems to both undergraduates and graduates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Computer Sciences department for nearly 25 years.The book is organized around three concepts fundamental to OS construction: virtualization (of CPU and memory), concurrency (locks and condition variables), and persistence (disks, RAIDS, and file systems).The material, if combined with serious project work and homeworks, will lead students to a deeper understanding and appreciation of modern OSes.The authors, Remzi and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, are both professors of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They have been doing research in computer systems for 30 years, working together since their first graduate operating systems class at U.C. Berkeley in 1993. Since that time, they have published over 100 papers on the performance and reliability of many aspects of modern computer systems, with a special focus on file and storage systems. Their work has been recognized with numerous best-paper awards, a test of time award, and some of their innovations can be found in the Linux and BSD operating systems today. Both were named ACM Fellows for "contributions to storage and computer systems" and both received the ACM-SIGOPS Mark Weiser award for "outstanding leadership, innovation, and impact in storage and computer systems research."

Review: Incredible treatment of virtualization. You can probably skip or skim the rest. - I wish I'd read this book years ago. This book covers 3 broad areas: virtualization, concurrency, and persistence. In my opinion the most worthwhile sections are the ones on virtualization. I found the sections on cpu virtualization (processes, interrupts, scheduling, context switches, etc) to be quite the riveting read, and super useful in my day-to-day work life. The sections on memory virtualization were equally useful, but I have to caution potential readers that this is probably the most difficult part of the book. It's written well, and everything is introduced step by step and with good motivation behind it, but... memory is just a lot more complicated than you think. Don't get discouraged if it doesn't click right away. For some reason, every book in the history of mankind has an uncontrollable urge to give the exact same treatment of concurrency as every other book, so the concurrency sections didn't "do it" for me. Finally, the persistence sections... there is some good and some bad here. The good would be the descriptions of a few unix file systems; I now have a very good understanding of what ext2/ext3/ext4/zfs are, how they work, what the tradeoffs are, and so on. I have a very good understanding of what it means to "mount" a device. I have good understanding of how paging works, and how memory can act as a cache for disk - at a low level. However, there is a lot of additional stuff in this chapter that doesn't need to be there IMO. To wit, descriptions of the various levels of hardware RAID (hardware raid is on its way out - software RAID does it all but better, and with only a small amount of overhead), and a collection of chapters on how flash-based storage works. Spoiler: flash-based storage is a nightmare. Just be glad somebody else did the work here, and cross your fingers that you never have to understand this stuff. I would happily pay full price for this book for just the virtualization parts. I am giving it 5 stars 100% because of the virtualization parts. The difference between knowing and not knowing these topics deeply is like night and day. It is difficult to impress upon you, dear reader, just how much of a difference this knowledge makes, in terms of confidence and competence in working in a unix-like environment. Finally, if you've read this far, let me recommend a followup to work through some time after this book: Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective. It has a lot of overlap with this book but is more advanced (for example, OSTEP covers memory virtualization over a hundred pages or so. CS:APP covers it in passing in like 10 pages, but uses this as the beginning of its treatment of memory mapping).
Review: Critical knowledge contained within → just keep reading! - The single most important resource for OS concepts that I have read so far. The tone of the writing is easy on the brain which helped me better focus on subject matter and the reference material. Finishing my first read through now, then I am planning go through all of the exercises during a second pass soon after. I have never enjoyed reading a text book to this level before, highly recommended. Paired nicely with "The design and implementation of the 4.3 BSD Unix OS" Misplaced my first copy once and replaced it pretty quickly, later found it so now I have a weathered marked up version for my bag and a new-looking copy for the shelf :D

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #22,567 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #1 in Computer Operating Systems Theory #16 in Computer Science (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.6 out of 5 stars 691 Reviews |

## Images

![Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61UIpzqnkRL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Incredible treatment of virtualization. You can probably skip or skim the rest.
*by Y***Y on November 20, 2025*

I wish I'd read this book years ago. This book covers 3 broad areas: virtualization, concurrency, and persistence. In my opinion the most worthwhile sections are the ones on virtualization. I found the sections on cpu virtualization (processes, interrupts, scheduling, context switches, etc) to be quite the riveting read, and super useful in my day-to-day work life. The sections on memory virtualization were equally useful, but I have to caution potential readers that this is probably the most difficult part of the book. It's written well, and everything is introduced step by step and with good motivation behind it, but... memory is just a lot more complicated than you think. Don't get discouraged if it doesn't click right away. For some reason, every book in the history of mankind has an uncontrollable urge to give the exact same treatment of concurrency as every other book, so the concurrency sections didn't "do it" for me. Finally, the persistence sections... there is some good and some bad here. The good would be the descriptions of a few unix file systems; I now have a very good understanding of what ext2/ext3/ext4/zfs are, how they work, what the tradeoffs are, and so on. I have a very good understanding of what it means to "mount" a device. I have good understanding of how paging works, and how memory can act as a cache for disk - at a low level. However, there is a lot of additional stuff in this chapter that doesn't need to be there IMO. To wit, descriptions of the various levels of hardware RAID (hardware raid is on its way out - software RAID does it all but better, and with only a small amount of overhead), and a collection of chapters on how flash-based storage works. Spoiler: flash-based storage is a nightmare. Just be glad somebody else did the work here, and cross your fingers that you never have to understand this stuff. I would happily pay full price for this book for just the virtualization parts. I am giving it 5 stars 100% because of the virtualization parts. The difference between knowing and not knowing these topics deeply is like night and day. It is difficult to impress upon you, dear reader, just how much of a difference this knowledge makes, in terms of confidence and competence in working in a unix-like environment. Finally, if you've read this far, let me recommend a followup to work through some time after this book: Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective. It has a lot of overlap with this book but is more advanced (for example, OSTEP covers memory virtualization over a hundred pages or so. CS:APP covers it in passing in like 10 pages, but uses this as the beginning of its treatment of memory mapping).

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Critical knowledge contained within → just keep reading!
*by A***X on March 10, 2026*

The single most important resource for OS concepts that I have read so far. The tone of the writing is easy on the brain which helped me better focus on subject matter and the reference material. Finishing my first read through now, then I am planning go through all of the exercises during a second pass soon after. I have never enjoyed reading a text book to this level before, highly recommended. Paired nicely with "The design and implementation of the 4.3 BSD Unix OS" Misplaced my first copy once and replaced it pretty quickly, later found it so now I have a weathered marked up version for my bag and a new-looking copy for the shelf :D

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Incredible, fun book - unexpected page-turner
*by M***O on February 14, 2023*

As a self-taught programmer and software engineer, I spent years with a voice inside my head telling me that low-level computing and systems engineering was not for me. This is the first book that I've been able to dive into and truly understand. I was impressed at how concise and clear the explanations are; the author's tone and light humor makes reading this fun. After just a few days with the book, I'm already 1/3rd of the way through. It really says something when a book on operating systems is a page-turner. If you're a programmer or engineer wanting to fill in the missing gaps in your knowledge, I highly recommend this.

## Frequently Bought Together

- Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces
- TCP/IP Illustrated: The Protocols, Volume 1 (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)
- Inside the Machine: An Illustrated Introduction to Microprocessors and Computer Architecture

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*Last updated: 2026-05-28*