Yeats famously said “Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.” He was right but wrong at the same time. You do have to “fill the pail” a bit, and these notes are certainly here to help with that part of your education; after all, when you go to interview at Google, and they ask you a trick question about how to use semaphores, it might be good to actually know what a semaphore is, right?
But Yeats’s larger point is obviously on the mark: the real point of education is to get you interested in something, to learn something more about the subject matter on your own and not just what you have to digest to get a good grade in some class. As one of our fathers (Remzi’s dad, Vedat Arpaci) used to say, “Learn beyond the classroom”.
We created these notes to spark your interest in operating systems, to read more about the topic on your own, to talk to your professor about all the exciting research that is going on in the field, and even to get involved with that research. It is a great field(!), full of exciting and wonderful ideas that have shaped computing history in profound and important ways.
And while we understand this fire won’t light for all of you, we hope it does for many, or even a few. Because once that fire is lit, well, that is when you truly become capable of doing something great. And thus the real point of the educational process: to go forth, to study many new and fascinating topics, to learn, to mature, and most importantly, to find something that lights a fire for you.
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Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces, Andrea and Remzi
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