Elmasri, Levine, and Carrick's 'spiral approach' to teaching operating systems develops student understanding of various OS components early on and helps students approach the more difficult aspects of operating systems with confidence. While operating systems have changed dramatically over the years, most OS books use a linear approach that covers each individual OS component in-depth, which is difficult for students to follow and requires instructors to constantly put materials in context. Elmasri, Levine, and Carrick do things differently by following an integrative or 'spiral' approach to explaining operating systems. The spiral approach alleviates the need for an instructor to 'jump ahead' when explaining processes by helping students 'completely' understand a simple, working, functional system as a whole in the very beginning. This is more effective pedagogically, and it inspires students to continue exploring more advanced concepts with confidence.
PART 1: Operating Systems Overview and Background 1 Getting Started 2 Operating System Concepts, Components, and Architectures PART 2: Building Operating Systems Incrementally: A Breadth-Oriented Spiral Approach 3 A Simple, Single Process Operating System 4 A Single User Multi-tasking Operating System 5 An Advanced Single User Multi-tasking Operating System 6 A Multiple-User Operating System - Linux 7 Parallel and Distributed Computing, Clusters and Grids PART 3: In Depth - Processes and Memory 8 Process Management: Concepts, Threads, and Scheduling 9 More Process Management: Inter-process Communication, Synchronization, and Deadlocks 10 Basic Memory Management 11 Advanced Memory Management PART 4: In Depth - Files and Input/Output 12 File Systems - Basics 13 File Systems - Examples and More Features 14 Disk Scheduling and Input/Output Management PART 5: In Depth - Networks and Distributed Processing 15 Introduction to Computer Networks 16 Protection and Security 17 Introduction to Distributed Systems PART 6: Case Studies 18 Windows Vista 19 Linux 20 The Palm OS Appendices Appendix A: Overview of Computer System and Architecture Concepts
