Operating systems form the backbone of modern computing, managing hardware resources and enabling software to run efficiently and securely.
OS design continues to evolve with AI-driven kernel optimization, edge computing architectures, and zero-trust security models becoming mainstream.
Understanding the foundational principles of how operating systems and middleware work has never been more important for developers, system administrators, and computer science students. The rise of containerization, cloud-native applications, and distributed systems demands a solid grasp of concurrency, memory management, scheduling, and inter-process communication.
Max Hailperin’s textbook takes a modern, systems-oriented approach to these core topics, bridging the gap between traditional operating system theory and the middleware layer that has become essential in contemporary distributed applications. Rather than treating middleware as an afterthought, this book integrates it as a first-class citizen alongside classic OS concepts.
About the book
Operating Systems and Middleware: Supporting Controlled Interaction is a comprehensive textbook designed for undergraduate computer science students at the junior or senior level, as well as first-year graduate students. Readers should have prior exposure to data structures and discrete mathematics.
The book covers the full spectrum of operating system concepts from threads and scheduling to virtual memory and file systems, while dedicating substantial attention to middleware technologies like remote procedure calls, messaging systems, and web services.
What sets this book apart is its consistent focus on controlled interaction between computations. Every chapter revisits this theme, examining how OS and middleware mechanisms enable computations to exchange data and coordinate work while maintaining security and isolation. The book includes practical POSIX API coverage, making it immediately applicable for C programmers working on real systems.
What you will learn
Readers will gain a deep understanding of how contemporary operating systems and middleware function, and why they are designed the way they are.
The book teaches practical skills including reasoning about and programming concurrent computations, understanding hardware-software interactions in memory management, using empirical measurement to guide scheduling and resource allocation decisions, analyzing system security threats and countermeasures, and building distributed applications using sockets, RPC, and messaging middleware.
Each chapter includes exercises that range from conceptual questions to programming projects, allowing readers to apply concepts in C and Java.
Table of contents
- Preface
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Threads
- 3. Scheduling
- 4. Synchronization and Deadlocks
- 5. Atomic Transactions
- 6. Virtual Memory
- 7. Processes and Protection
- 8. Files and Other Persistent Storage
- 9. Networking
- 10. Messaging, RPC, and Web Services
- 11. Security
- A. Stacks
- Bibliography
- Index
Book details
- Title: Operating Systems and Middleware: Supporting Controlled Interaction
- Author(s): Max Hailperin
- Publication year: 2019
- Publisher: Self-published (Revised Edition 1.3.1)
- Pages: 559
- PDF size: 7.57 MB
- Estimated reading time: ~14 h
- Level: Intermediate / Advanced
- Main category: Systems and Networking
- Subcategory: (not applicable)
- Language: English
- License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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