Very good book about Linux
The Art of Linux Kernel Design: Illustrating the Operating System Design Principle
Amazon Reviews:
This book has lot of details, I mean lot of details. Linux kernel 0.11 has been dissected and explained in very detailed way in this book,The reason I am giving a 4 star is not because it focuses on 0.11 version which is over 20 years, but I find a lack of security focus on the book. Otherwise this is certainly a stellar book on Operating systems concepts. If you have read Tanenbaum's Operating systems book on MINIX, this will be a very similar treatment. Code has been dissected wonderfully! I cannot imagine the reverse engineering process of understanding the code and making it easy to explain to people.
The book starts with BIOS and how operating systems are bootstrapped. I really liked how the explanations are done - lot of source code, and design diagrams. This is like a design document for the kernel.There are lot of diagrams, yes plenty! file operations, process management, inter process communication, operating system design, buffer management are all explained in great detail. Overall explanations are great and this will be a wonderful asset to any student. Using Linux 0.11 makes it very easy to explain as foundations to operating systems are all same and a student can learn concepts well. As I said earlier, security should be taught from beginning and this is the biggest gap in systems design and how programming is taught. It cannot be an afterthought. It should be taught from beginning like from this book.