FreeDOS Kernel; An MS-DOS Emulator for Platform Independence and Embedded Systems Development

I really regret purchasing this book. Here are my main complaints:1.) The book was written in 1995, half a decade after ANSI C90 was established, and yet I see K&R style constructs. This leads to problems when actually compiling on modern compilers that have options to generate 16-bit code. Speaking of compilers, this leads to my second complaint.2.) The tools that the author suggests to use (Microsoft C or Borland C) are completely dead. When I asked my professor for help, he literally laughed at me and told me to give up. Well, I didn't listen to him, and used Borland C++/Open Watcom to build the project, but that still failed. The compiler gave me a crapload of errors. When I checked the lines that caused the errors, I saw some awkward structure definitions that made no sense to me. Now, I understand C90/99, and I am pretty sure that things likestruct blah{ struct huh int what; int dunno;};(There are supposed to be tabs before "int what" and "int dunno." Code is supposed to look like declaring a struct inside another struct, but does it in an erroneous way that doesn't compile.)are not supposed to compile anyway.I bought this book because I wanted to learn about OS development by studying a simplistic OS. If you are like me, I recommend purchasing Tanenbaum's "Operating Systems Design and Implementation." It is modern and building the project is way simpler, and there are lots of FAQ's about building the project. The content of this book is good. The explanations are clear, and the source code in the book is commented and explained thoroughly. The author should consider writing a second edition for this book to make the source code up to date, as well as completely rewriting the section on what software to use so that the reader can build the kernel.

Copyright 1996, this is a 'C' version of the Dos kernel. Source code is available on-line, but you'll have to search for it. And this won't run on 64-bit Windows platforms anymore -- perhaps in a DosBox it would.Having said all that, this is still a pretty good introduction into how to implement the low-level services of Dos, file-systems, API, command-line interpreters. All done from 'C' (with occasional drop-downs to 8086 assembly for the low-level parts).So many tutorials remain at the level of theoretical ideals, it's refreshing to have this one which goes into all the implementation details.

This is my second pass on this book.And each pass gives more pleasure.Excellently designed while obeying ms-dos compatability.Excellent explanations.Highly commented programs.I have got the overall picture.But the f-node related functions are somehow harder to understand and needs more explanation.I have made pass 1 on Podanoffsky's dissecting dos.This book is much better than the latter.If there had been a table showing the functions and the files they are in it would have been better. I am looking for a similar book on a multiprogramming OS and as easy to grasp as this one.

interessante libro che tratta dell'implementazione dell'MS-DOS in una versione free