BKDSINTL.RVW 940407 Addison-Wesley Publishing Company Heather Rignanesi, Marketing, x340, 73171.657@Compuserve.com P.O. Box 520 26 Prince Andrew Place Don Mills, Ontario M3C 2T8 416-447-5101 fax: 416-443-0948 or Tiffany Moore, Publicity tiffanym@aw.com Bob Donegon bobd@aw.com John Wait, Editor, Corporate and Professional Publishing johnw@aw.com Tom Stone, Editor, Higher Education Division tomsto@aw.com Philip Sutherland, Schulman Series 74640.2405@compuserve.com 1 Jacob Way Reading, MA 01867-9984 800-822-6339 617-944-3700 Fax: (617) 944-7273 5851 Guion Road Indianapolis, IN 46254 800-447-2226 "DOS Internals", Chappell, 1994, 0-201-60835-9, U$39.95/C$51.95 geoffc@cix.compulink.co.uk Chappell admits that anything prior to MS-DOS 3.30 is ancient history to him. It is therefore amusing to note his contention that, historically speaking, there has never been enough conventional memory on PCs. (Sorry, Geoff, I'm old enough to remember this upstart program called 1-2-3 which was never going to amount to anything because it required a preposterous 128K of memory.) The means of circumventing the "640K barrier," though, has certainly exercised programmers recently and forms a substantial proportion of this book. Two of the four parts deal with memory management and extended memory management. The other two discuss some development tools and disk management. Chappell also admits to a rather ragged manuscript in the preparation of the book. That still shows in some of the organization and structure. The sequence of activities involved in the boot process is described in detail--but not all of that material is contained in chapter three, entitled, "The Startup Sequence." There are also gaps in the material, even at 768 pages: chapter five, on "Program Execution" doesn't touch on batch files at all. That the author knows his stuff is beyond question. There is much here for the serious DOS programmer. Particularly about memory. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994 BKDSINTL.RVW 940407 ====================== DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Oct. '94) Springer-Verlag