This textbook is something of a classic in the field, and is engaging enough to read in your free time. There were some passages that I thought a good editor could have tightened up, but overall it's an enjoyable book. Regardless of whether you've taken a class on operating systems, I believe you can benefit from reading about the design of 4.4 BSD. And used copies are easy enough to find at a decent price.

Additionally, I can't help but notice that this book was published in 1996. I remember hearing that it was possible to get "free operating systems" on the Internet back then, but I never truly believed it. 4.4 BSD was one of those operating systems, and it was far more advanced than Windows 95 (the system I used at the time). If only I had known better, I could have saved myself an incredible amount of frustration by switching to the UNIX world three years (or more) earlier. As it was, I discovered Linux in '99.

Good stuff if you are into the details of this sort of thing.

Needs a better editor. Or a ghostwriter. It's full of the sort of mangled writing that academics seem to love. The contents are interesting, but sometimes the overview gets too detailed. The level of familiarity assumed seems inconsistent: some fairly basic concepts are discussed at length, while other not-so-basic concepts are assumed common knowledge.