Learn Operating Systems

Course details

Hello Students. Welcome to the course on Operating Systems!

Implementing concurrency in an operating system really helps you reason about concurrent code in other situations. Though most computer science majors won't work with operating systems directly, most probably will work with concurrent code.

Additionally, with almost any programming work, despite loads of abstractions, you'll be exposed in some way to the actual computers running your code. That means having a deep understanding the stack, the heap, virtual memory, and more is really valuable.

In general we find that any difficult coursework in computer science—from systems-level stuff like operating systems to theoretical stuff like type theory and logic—to be helpful with general problem-solving ability. Trying to solve hard operating systems problems makes you smarter and better at solving problems in general. This probably applies more broadly even—if you had taken some tough physics classes it would have made you a smarter programmer—but operating systems problems are surprisingly similar to some web development ones and that's what makes it important.

Assuming...

int a[][] = new int[1000][1000];

...one of the following loops will run much more efficiently than the other. Can you figure out which one?

for (int i = 0; i < a.length; i++) {
for (int j = 0; j < a[0].length; j++) {
a[i][j] = 0;
}
}

OR

for (int i = 0; i < a[0].length; i++) {
for (int j = 0; j < a.length; j++) {
a[j][i] = 0;
}
}

A course in operating systems is important for a software developer. You can abstract away complexity but in practice you need to understand the system so you can write well performing programs.

In this course, you will learning all the concepts of Operating Systems. These include Processes, Threads, Inter-process communication, Concurrency, Synchronization, Deadlock, CPU Scheduling, Memory Management, Virtual Memory and File Systems.