Typical Single Semester Course

The following provides a selection of topics for a typical undergraduate course where the goal is to introduce students to the concepts of operating systems. We expect the typical undergraduate introductory operating systems course to partially cover the first 15 chapters, as well as Chapter 18 (Virtual Machines). Below are some recommendations what safely may be skipped yet still provide the student with a solid understanding of what operating systems are and what they do.

This text integrates three different APIs - POSIX (Linux/macOS/UNIX), Java, and to a lesser extent Windows. You may choose to cover just one of the APIs depending upon student experience. For those students familiar with C, we strongly encourage following the POSIX-based coverage of the text. For those more familiar with Java, we encourage you to use the Java API.

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