in which order should we read?

[ankebut]

Dear My Friends,

(Firstly please execuse me for my english because I am not native.)

I want to read all of documentation on the osdev wiki but my mind was confused. Because I do not know how to start or actually, which section should I start with? Until that time I have been reading a lot of book and absolutely they have a precise ordered index for starting from first page to end.

I have tried to find an ordered index list and also have tried to find an answer to why osdev has not any index but I couldnot find anything.

May you offer me an "order of reading list" please?

Kind regards.

[Solar]

That's because it is not a book, was never intended to be one. It is a collection of related information, not a step-by-step tutorial (though it contains some of those).

From the Main Page, you should definitely start with the section "Introduction". Most importantly IMHO, the page about Required Knowledge. Note #12, "The Concept": You should already have an overall concept in your mind, and the experience to know roughly what needs to be doing, only using the Wiki (and this forum) to augment knowledge you already have. You should not be looking for anything "step by step", because if you do, you are setting yourself up for failure...

[iansjack]

It's more in the nature of an Encyclopaedia. Lots of information, and references to other information, but it can be difficult to follow the plot.

But probably easier than "Finnegan's Wake".

[Schol-R-LEA]

(OK, to be honest, this reply is mostly to fill in some of the younger members and non-native English readers, who may not know what and who Iansjack was talking about. In other words, I am explaining Ianjack's joke, which I realize is poor form, but I suspect may be necessary here. Feel free to skip it if you did get it, or if you aren't curious.)

But probably easier than "Finnegan's Wake".

Yeah, a novel which is comprised of a single extended dream sequence, in several chapters? A bit tricky to parse. While I am hardly a scholar of James Joyce's canon, I am pretty certain that being confused (and making up your own mind as to what it all means) is an intentional part of the experience of reading novels such as Finnegan's Wake and Ulysses. There is a reason why Finnegan's Wake is often described as the most challenging literary work to read in the English language. I know I haven't finished it yet, despite multiple attempts at it.

Joyce wasn't always so abstruse; even Ulysses wasn't quite as challenging as FW (not that I ever finished it, either, it's still a hard book to read). While I haven't read it myself, I understand that Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is much easier to follow, though this may be because it was early in his career when he wasn't ready to eschew convention so blatantly as he later did. (Also, I understand that the main character - Stephen Daedalus, who is also in Ulysses but not as much of a central figure - was Joyce's alter ego/author surrogate in much the same way Raoul Duke was Hunter S. Thompson's, and I have read that a certain amount of autobiography crept into it despite it mostly being fictional.)

Now, back to our regularly scheduled whatever it is we're doing here.

[ankebut]

@Solar @iansjack @Schol-R-LEA Thank you.

Lastly may you offer me a book which has an index?
It's too hard to learn these subjects by osdev-wiki for me.

[iansjack]

Tanenbaums Operating Systems: Design and Implementation is always worth reading, although it is not the last word on the subject. Singh's Mac OS X Internals also discusses the design of the operating system, although it is by no means a tutorial. Similar books are available on the design of Unix, Linux, and FreeBSD - again, none of them are light reading. But it's a deep subject, so you can't expect an Operating System Design for Dummies.

None of these books will give you a step-by-step guide to writing an operating system. I think that such a book would be too prescriptive to be useful.

[Love4Boobies]

I never really liked books that discuss implementations as an introduction to a subject. They're trying to teach two things and do it rather poorly: how to design and how to engineer. Read a book on OS theory as they are more in-depth (e.g., Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems or Operating System Concepts by Silberschatz et al.) and learn how to write your code somewhere else (any suggestion for a book that I could make wouldr rely on too many factors so I won't do it here).