Inside Windows NT (Microsoft Programming Series)

The eagerly awaited second edition of this well-known volume. INSIDE WINDOWS NT has long provided the best architectural overview of Microsoft Windows NT-and that’s made it an important road map for Windows NT developers and for students of operating systems. Now this new edition is fully revised, updated, and expanded. The material on the Windows NT file system (NTFS) that was a separate monograph has been folded into the new edition, as has an entire chapter on the cache manager. This edition includes more detailed descriptions of code flows, data structures, and other elements. It also includes hands-on experiments that describe how you can watch the internal behaviour of Windows NT by using various tools that come with the product. Readers will discover a detailed under-the-hood investigation of the Windows NT 4.0 internals and the associated coding implications. This edition includes prerelease information about Windows NT 5.0.Beginning with broad NT concepts and then focusing sequentially on various key systems, Solomon dissects NT with a surgeon’s care and a software engineer’s thoroughness. That’s not to say that this book is mainly about writing programs. Rather, this is the kind of guide that power users wish for, explaining why and how things happen and glossing over very little. Programmers will value the clear NT API hints.

Initially, the author talks about important NT tools (such as Performance Monitor) and concepts (such as the idea of virtual memory and how it’s mapped). He illustrates all abstract concepts with excellent conceptual drawings that make it easier to comprehend what NT is doing. A chapter on NT’s architecture explains how the system works as a whole. Later chapters focus on individual subsystems, providing extensive coverage of processes, memory, input/output, security, caches, and NT. After reading the chapter on memory management, for instance, you’ll have a solid grasp of paging and the internal settings that affect it. The book also contains experiments that guide the reader through concept-illustrating procedures. For example, readers crash their machines to see and analyze the dump log–a valuable skill. –David Wall