Product Description

See how the core components of the Windows operating system work behind the scenes—guided by a team of internationally renowned internals experts. Fully updated for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, this classic guide delivers key architectural insights on system design, debugging, performance, and support—along with hands-on experiments to experience Windows internal behavior firsthand. Delve inside Windows architecture and internals: • Understand how the core system and management mechanisms work—from the object manager to services to the registry • Explore internal system data structures using tools like the kernel debugger • Grasp the scheduler's priority and CPU placement algorithms • Go inside the Windows security model to see how it authorizes access to data • Understand how Windows manages physical and virtual memory • Tour the Windows networking stack from top to bottom—including APIs, protocol drivers, and network adapter drivers • Troubleshoot file-system access problems and system boot problems • Learn how to analyze crashes 

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8198 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1264 pages

Customer Reviews

After the 4th and the 5th, I shall be pre-ordering the 6th ;-}
Around October 2008, I invested in the 4th (XP & Server 2000/2003) edition of this book and having been really impressed with its breadth and depth of cover I knew that the 5th edition (whenever it was released) would be a good read, although I naively expected that it would be a simple rehash of the 4th.

What a pleasant surprise, when the 5th (Vista & Server 2008) arrived much larger than 4th and completely rewritten. It's a total complement to the 4th.

The pair are essential for anyone wanting to appreciate the incredible amount of development that has occured from XP to VISTA or for anyone wanting to develop software for use across the current Windows platforms.

The tools described for research and debugging (many free from Sysinternals) are clearly explained. Well done Mark, David & Alex.

Looking forward to the 6th edition for Windows 7 (now that is confusing)

Very in depth resource for IT Pros and Developers
I have only had this book for a couple of days and have not completely finished reading it yet so cannot comment on all of the chapters, but what I have read so far has been interesting and valuable. Obviously in a book like this that goes into so much depth in so many areas, there are going to be some parts that are not useful to everyone but there is so much detailed information in here that I think any IT pro or Windows developer will find it an interesting and useful read.

This is very different to any other IT book I have read because normally these books just tell you how to do something and perhaps give you a brief explanation of how it works behind the scenes but this book is ALL ABOUT what happens behind the scenes. As a small example: a couple of pages in the Security section explain what exactly happens when you press Ctrl Alt Delete and log in (and also what happens before that point) - it explains which processes, DLLs, APIs, internal functions etc are used and in what order they are used... and that is one of the less detailed parts of this book! Other sections even go far as telling you the names of internal data structures and constants that Windows uses to do its work and although I have only had a brief look at the Memory Management chapter, it seems extremely detailed (over 140 pages).

It is actually more useful to me as an IT pro than I thought as it has given me an insight into things that I use often at work such as Hyper V (although that is one of the less in depth parts, there are still roughly 15 pages dedicated to it), the Volume Shadow Copy service, the Cache system built into Windows, networking, crash dump analysis and much more.

One thing I will say, which is not necessarily negative, is that it is not for beginners. I think really you need to understand at least a little bit about programming concepts and terminology and also be very familiar with Windows in general to really understand what a lot of this book is telling you. I've been an IT Professional for 3 years or so and do some .NET programming whenever I can but I struggle to grasp some of the things that are in here as there is not always an explanation of some of the terms or acronnyms used. To be fair to the author though, I dont think explanations of such things belong in this book as then it would be weighed down with explanations of too many basic concepts etc (and it is already roughly 1100 pages!).

Overall, one of the most interesting IT books I have purchased and I am looking forward to reading the rest of it.

Excelent book
As an Alex's blog regular follower, I had great expectations on the outcome of this book. I've got to say that based on his previous work, I was a little disappointed on the contents shortage of some major important aspects of the kernel. But, it still is the best reference out there and is much more clearer and complete than the previous editions. So i'll give 5 thumbs up :). Definitely a must for those kernel geeks out threre.