Ask HN: Best Book for learning about Operating Systems, especially windows?

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My wife is a physcist who works with .NET. We sometimes talk about operating system, and she wanted to learn more.

She's a .NET dev who would ideally like a book focused on Windows that she can learn from. I didn't paticularly like or hate my textbooks in school, but what would be best for her?

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Sometimes it might be too technical, however, I would strongly recommend "Modern Operating Systems 4th edition by Andrew Tanenbaum". (Chapter 11 is about Windows in particular). It provides a great technical overview of most common operating systems as well as hardware and the connection to operating system on the low level.

"Windows Internals" 7th ed. part 1 and 2 by Mark Russinovich would be the definitive current reference on how Windows itself works but assumes knowledge of how operating systems in general work already.

For general OS knowledge, I second the other poster's recommendation of Tanenbaum's "Modern Operating Systems"

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