Looking for resources to supplement this textbook on OS

Hello everyone, I’m fairly new to programming, and amongst other things, I am currently learning about Operating systems through this free book:

http://markburgess.org/os/os.pdf

aimed at beginners.

I wanted to learn the basics of how OSs work because even if a deep knowledge of them was not required for the jobs I was after, I thought that having such knowledge would
a)never hurt,
b) might always come in handy in the other things I was studying here. (namely python, and the networking course) and
c) might allow me to better understand how to personalise my linux distribution!

Now, although the book is indeed useful and good for beginners, it was written in 2001, which means that some things have changed since then.

For example, things like SSDs, GPUs were not as common back then, so there is no mention of them thus far.

So whilst some things in the book are still relevant (for example having an understanding of UNIX systems is still useful to understand today’s UNIX-like operating systems even if the popularity of UNIX has slowly been declining) some things are clearly outdated or are incomplete.

My question is then the following:
is it necessary, for a basic understanding of OSs to know this new information or would the information presented in this book suffice ?
And if it wouldn’t, where would be a good place to learn and to pad out my notes from this book? Many thanks!

The core ideas of how an OS work haven’t really changed much since that book came out.

Does this mean that I am fairly okay with sticking to learning just the content in this book, and, in the worst case scenario if something I haven’t seen before about OSs does comes up in my studying I am fairly alright to just google it and be able to interpret the result without too much difficulty?

That’s what I’d start out with. You can always expand your search if needed.

I skimmed through what topics are covered in that book. All of those topics are still relevant today.

Being concerned about SSH and GPU enhancements don’t actually matter much from an operating system standpoint, as its the software that interacts with the hardware. What kind of hardware its running on might of changed dramatically in the last 20 years, but the general idea behind the hardware is still the same.

For a developer Unix, specifically Linux is still very popular, especially with the rise of the cloud. Which is something not relevant to OS’s but is one of the major new technologies to rise since this version was published. Most of the worlds servers, run on Linux. Unless your a windows shop, you probably will end up interacting with Linux, which at its core has stayed the same for decades.

You should be fine going through this book, all the concepts mentioned in it seem relevant (at a glance). Some things like specific commands, or specifications might of changed over the years however. I’d just take everything with a grain of salt that you are looking into how things are done around 20 years ago.

However most things 20 years ago follow at least the same architecture and principles.

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