Create Your Own Operating System

Absolutely love this book! Of course it is not going to go deep into kernel development, buy operating system concepts or a book on Linux kernel development if you want that (well researched and studied) topic. But if you Simply are curious about how to create something that gets loaded by the bios, sets up a basic terminal and leaves you a hook into developing the capabilities of the kernel, this is your book. I am super grateful that Lucas has broken that process down into a shot and concise step by step guide of which I have never seen presented so easily before. Other reviews referred to it as “simple”, I’d go one step further and just say it was presented “clearly”. Great teachers can make complicated things easier to digest and Lucas has done just that with this book. Highly recommended to anyone that wants to know about the magic between the power button and a loaded OS. And last thing I’ll say is that I love that it is only a little over 100 pages. it gets right to it! Books don’t have to weight 5 lbs to have value. :)

My first thought was that this book is almost useless. But it was actually very useful for me as for the one who wants to understand how the system boots up, what it is expected to have done and everything else related to "I wanna create my own os!".I have a strong knowledge of both C and C++ and a bit of asm (NASM & FASM), so first like 5 chapters were really useless for me, I have just skipped them, there is nothing interesting and so it was like a half of book is skipped which made me sad. But later an interesting information eventually appeared to me: creating a bootloader, starting it, creating kernel entry point and collecting things together into something usable. The book even provides a very-very basic but somewhat an easy kernel with ttys still.If the whole book was written so that it is useful in each page without that useless intros to C and ASM (why would anyone want to buy such a book if he did not know these languages, lol?), I'd give it 5 stars. Now it is like 3.5 for me. Also, the book quality itself could better: it is difficult to open it not in the middle and make it stay opened while you are going to do something (or even read?), it closes itself immediately.

If you are like me and expecting to be able to build your own operating system on a Windows 10 machine using something like Cygwin and a Linux emulator, you will find that the instructions in this book will not work. I can't remember where in the book the problem is, but it is obvious that the author did not test his instructions on a Windows 10 setup. The whole world uses Windows. Not Linux. Forget who is giving you the message, and just get the message. Fix it please with a new edition and make it work on Windows 10. End of message.

If you think a bare-metal program that jams "Hello world!" into a display controller is an operating system, you'll love it. If you think you can write an interrupt handler without knowing what a stack frame is, you're headed for Dunning-Kruger gold, and this your guidebook.I've written bare-metal applications, and it's a lot of fun. I've done Unix-class operating system development, and it's a lot of fun, and have had fun writing the kind of device driver that lives on a network card ROM where cold start can find it for network booting. (I've also done compiler and mainframe instruction set microcode development, and those are fun, too, but off topic.)Among very many other things:-- You don't see "nothing" after a C string's image in memory. You see a NUL (zero) byte, and that's part of the string, NUL termination is part of the string. Being unable to predict or trust a value is nothing - cold, hard, known, reliable zero isn't nothing..-- Back in the 1970s, functions like 'strcat' were considered system utilities. Now, they're security vulnerabilities. Please do not accept the suggestion that you include these in your 'operating system'.-- Synchronization primitives might start, but do not end with turning off interrupts. Not by a half-century of computer science and computer architecture development.This developer seems proud of his IoT (Internet of Things) development experience. Well, the recent Mirai attack turned IoT devices (including many security cameras) into advertisements for male enhancement products. I fully understand the "It's Easy! It's Fun!" approach to software development, especially at the lower levels.I also understand the responsibilities or real engineers in building our world. I don't hold a PE as an engineer (unlike other PEs in my family), even software engineer, but I agree strongly with certification for engineers doing life-critical work, I'm well aware of MISRA, FDA,FAA, and DOE standards for software reliability, So, I find it quite odd that this author shows no such awareness.It's fun, yes, it's huge fun. (I've done about as much programming in VHDL as I have in various assemblers or Java.) But, when "the patient might die" or " the bank lost all its money" or "so sorry about that missile" is a possible outcome, it isn't easy."Hello world!" is not an operating system. Normally, I'd put an unwanted book back into the library system or used market. This time, I feel morally impelled to keep it out of of others' hands. I hope the recycled pulp will make someone's life better. This text certainly won't.-- wiredweird.PS: My wife has been nagging me about writing my own OS text for developers involved with embedded systems; I consider this a kick in the pants. I've taught university OS courses for CS and for EE students, and I think the latter are direly under-served. As an OS text, this serves no one well.

Waste of a good tree. Half of the meager book is how to install CentOS in VirtualBox, and not much after that. Save your money and buy a movie ticket, it would be more enjoyable and better use of your dollars.