They are pretty good indeed to begin with. However, the best resource there is is clearly osdev.org, both the forums and the wiki are full of information!
The OSDev wiki is the best think to hit the internet since sliced bread (with cats faces pushed through them?) but it's far from a tutorial. It's a wiki.
While it is one of the best repositories of knowledge on the subject of low level development, it's not a step by step guide.
In the same way I don't recommend that people read Wikipedia to learn about human history I'd also not recommend reading osdev to learn about low level development.
It at it's heart is organized as a reference, not a text book.
I wish that someone would go through and accumulate all the knowledge, put it into a series based textbook with chapters, throw in some example code and VMs for many architectures, and sell it to me because I'd pay. I'd also push for those at my university to construct a class around the book as it would be one of the most fascinating and knowledge packed classes I'd think you could take. (Hint hint, nudge nudge writers and professors!)
I don't know but the Tanenbaum books."Operating Systems Design and Implementation" is old, but the appendix is the full C source code to Minix 3.0 if you buy the 3rd Edition.
I had the 1st Edition with around 12K lines of C in the appendix. Great book, and I had Minix 1.5 running on my old Amiga around 1990. Minix was more portable than Linux, which came out around 4 year after Minix.
I had my money on Minix when Linux came along, since Minix was a microkernel, and I thought it sounded like the better direction to take. Well, Linux won out, and funny enough microkernels came back in style anyway with MachTen, MkLinux, and QNX. QNX was very successful in the realtime OS world. I used it on two jobs.
The newer Tanenbaum book: "Modern Operating Systems" I have not read, but if it is like the first one, I'd imagine it would be very educational too.
> I had my money on Minix when Linux came along, since Minix was a microkernel, and I thought it sounded like the better direction to take. Well, Linux won
well, I am too young to witnesses the things, but I read from Tannenbaum, that his main intention was to keep Minix so small, that his students were able to understand it ine one semester. And that seems like a big limitation to me ...
I think small adds to understanding. In addition, the whole point is to keep the kernel small in microkernels, and most, if not all, userland stuff is implemented outside of the kernel, so small is good here.
You can fork and add to it if you want to expand the kernel.
I happen to have a bias for minimalism and small: Shen, Forth, PicoLisp, wasplisp (MOSREF pentesting environment), J programming language, etc...
I think there is too much bloat in web dev, backend, frontend, and PLs in general. I really appreciate it when I see somebody elegantly, and with little code or extra tooling solve a problem in a straight forward manner.
These are all useful. If you're more of a book worm check out Minix as said in other parts of this tree. Very very easy to read, interesting bits of history about OS development, and source code included! Nothing's useful without source code.
If you'd like to look up some general software books check out Programming the IBM PC, or something to that effect. It's commonly called The Pink Shirt Book. Has interesting stuff on IBM interrupts, coding standards, and bits on filesystems!
Yes sorry, I had just woken up and was on mobile. Couldn't gather my whits to find the link. Now that I've got a cup of joe in me I'm much more chipper and ready for this!
Yes that's the link. They walk you through everything! Top to bottom. It's a great starter that will teach you what OS development actually involves. It's like a hand holding experience through a forest of strange practices, you'll love it when you get a chance.
