I love this "little book about X" concept. I believe there is a lot of chicanery going on in the modern world of textbooks - a lot of stuff that is stretched to hundreds of pages (to get more money out of the book, I assume) could be condensed down to a double-digit number of pages, without significant loss of information.

Knowledge should be simplified as much as it can. I am human and I can only parse so much text per day. Keeping things simple and terse should be the basic etiquette of communication.

I agree. I think that this will happen more over time. Part of this is academia protecting itself (or trying) from the hoi polloi, and part of it is institutional problems. If a 50 page book can teach a subject then the instructor isn’t needed right? More importantly, if pupils are using the book and a tutor, why have the professor?

OTOH, the professor may do research or bring prestige to the school, and as such the school tries to protect that professor. Likewise the book written by that professor may fund part of the research being done. There was a time when large monied interests would fund research, but that was transformed into government and mostly DOD funding during the Cold War… so Stanford, while producing many brilliant and visionary leaders of our time, also produced shit tons of nukes.

> If a 50 page book can teach a subject then the instructor isn’t needed right?

I honestly expect the opposite—it takes so much expertise to be able to condense so much knowledge in such short writing, with proper build-up of interdependent concepts and without losing clarity.

Most authors of textbooks are grad students who don't see a single dime out of it. If anything, I think that it is to reach the minimum word count to get it accepted.

Related:

The little book about OS development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13258063 - Dec 2016 (45 comments)

The little book about OS development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9586983 - May 2015 (2 comments)

The little book about OS development (2012) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8866912 - Jan 2015 (18 comments)

The pdf link was almost invisible on my phone. Here's the link https://littleosbook.github.io/book.pdf

Meta: It's weird, it says I submitted this 3 hours ago but I was not on the phone/computer at that time. I recall submitting this at some point but it would have been yesterday or earlier.

Handpicked good submissions get "boosted" by the mods, which rewrites their timestamps.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/pool for a list of such posts.

That explains a lot! I've noticed a lot of times posts seemed older than their date says.

This is from 2015. What would the HN community recommend as the best possible 'little book about OS development' in 2022?

Thanks.

for something like this 2015 is still fine. (I think because it goes through GRUB even UEFI/BIOS doesn't matter, but I could be wrong on that one)

I think this blog goes pretty far: https://os.phil-opp.com

Amazing. but some files returns 404. for example this one http://littleosbook.github.com/files/stage2_eltorito

How to write .net based os so it starts in virtual box as seamlessly as possible?

You can't really write an OS in a language that requires a runtime environment, like C# or Java — you'll still need another lower-level language like C/C++ or Rust to build a runtime (CLR/JVM/...) that would run on the bare metal.

You can build a kernel in C#, ofc you lose .NET.

https://wiki.osdev.org/C_Sharp_Bare_Bones

Not .net, but you can make one in C#. You just won't get to use .net. https://wiki.osdev.org/C_Sharp_Bare_Bones

Try Cosmos: https://www.gocosmos.org/

Thx!