The order of learning the books mentioned in OSdev books

[vjeremiah]

I have seen a topic called Books on OS development under Resources topic in OSDev main page.

But i came to know that that book list was in alphabetic order not in the order which should i learn

so if anyone knows that please reply to me or send me through email address

E-mail:[email protected]

Advance thanks for who replies for me....

[Antti]

I think there is no right answers to that. In theory, you should read all the algorithms books and perhaps some other mathematical books first. When you master these fields, you can consider start looking at computer architecture. Then you could move on to actual programming and finally to the actual OS development. In practice, I do not think this is anyhow realistic approach. Has anyone started like this? Usually people first try something and then study just enough to move a little bit further etc. When this loop has run some time, the actual theory gets more interesting (like algorithms).

However, I recommend to just start with The C Programming Language book (K&R) and learn how to program (if you do not know yet).

[Combuster]

Software engineering is a combination of knowledge and experience. You need both to write an OS - You can't do it if you only ever read books and never write your own code, and you can't do it if you you only know how to piece the bits from stackoverflow together into a program without knowing where they came from.

And for OS development, experience is actually the most important thing. Many of the things you will be doing is not found in any book so you will need to be good at getting the information you actually need. For that matter, getting all of those books is just silly.

[Mikemk]

@OP, please tell me this is a joke.

[Antti]

please tell me this is a joke

I do not think this is a joke or a thing to be made fun of. If we take an intelligent person who has accomplished in other fields and for some reason has suddenly (but seriously) decided to start making an OS, the approach to this could be quite similar to this. He did not ask any silly questions but figured it out that it would be wise to start reading books. Of course things become much clearer when you got some knowledge and then questions like this look a little bit novice. However, things like OS developing looks exactly like this when you do not know much (or anything at all).

Yes, there is also the required knowledge requirement here but questions like this are fine to me. Nevertheless, my answers do not help much...

[Mikemk]

@Antti, what I am surprised about is that somebody would think that everything in the books section of the wiki needed to be read, or that it should be read in a specific order before starting.

Personally, I say stick to tutorials, such as brokenthorn, then look at books later

[iansjack]

Personally, I'd prefer studying the books to just following tutorials. Encourage people to learn for themselves rather than just copying what others have done.

[Antti]

Tutorials are better if you have to worry about the motivation especially when making first steps. If we take a beginner who has not fully dedicated to the project, it is usually better to get quick results to increase the motivation. Otherwise, this hobby might come to an end before it even starts. However, there are people who go through no matter what. Then there is no problem keeping motivation up: you continue whether it is fun or not.

In the latter case, books work much better than tutorials. Like iansjack said, tutorials easily lead to copying what others have done. Yes, also books may work like tutorials but usually they do not give "copy-paste" code or otherwise strictly instruct to follow a certain path.

[Prochamber]

I agree with Antti, tutorials are better for beginners. That's not to say that book aren't useful but if you're a beginner starting from scratch is hard. I would even say that it's good to mess with someone else's code first to get a feel of how different parts of an operating system work before getting started.

[Mikemk]

I agree with Antti, tutorials are better for beginners. That's not to say that book aren't useful but if you're a beginner starting from scratch is hard. I would even say that it's good to mess with someone else's code first to get a feel of how different parts of an operating system work before getting started.

Provided that you take care not to directly reuse said code.