Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces - Key Takeaways

Dates Read: 09/04/2025 - 10/19/2025

Rating: 4/5

Remzi and Andrea have very likely written a quintessential book for every computer science and computer engineering student's arsenal, as well as for any introductory operating systems course.

I first read this in my introductory operating systems course, but at the time I didn't appreciate the value of the book, especially considering that OSTEP is freely available online.

It covers everything you need for interviews, but more importantly, it teaches the core concepts every engineer should understand. Whether you want to explain the difference between a process and a thread or understand the different scheduling algorithms and when to apply them, this book has you covered.

It also does a great job explaining virtualization and how it provides programs with the illusion of their own private address space while abstracting away the underlying hardware.

The authors break the textbook into four sections:

• Virtualization
• Concurrency
• Persistence
• Security

The order you read them doesn't really matter, but I still prefer to start from the beginning since the concepts naturally build on one another.

This is another book where you'll get the most value by working through the exercises.

What I especially like are the references and footnotes throughout the chapters. If you want to dive deeper into a topic, the authors provide historical context through research papers, conference talks, Stack Overflow discussions, and even a few jokes along the way.

I mean, even on the book's homepage they provide a list of non-technical books to read just to keep us nerds balanced.

A great tip when reading this book is to keep your own notes instead of always trying to revisit entire chapters. The chapters aren't especially long, but you'll be much better served by putting the concepts into your own words and then teaching them to someone else.