Windows Sysinternals Administrator's Reference

Fantastic aid for learning about Windows

Every Windows IT Administrator, Developer, or Hobbyist should be familiar with the free Sysinternals tools available from Microsoft's website. The tools provide the one of the best ways for learning about what is "under the hood" of the Windows OS. There are a lot of books about Windows out there, and you could learn about the lower level functionality of the OS from many of them, but this book differs in a couple ways. First, it is not an exhaustive introduction to Windows. The 2nd chapter called Windows Core Concepts is only about 20 pages long, so it doesn't cover anything in depth. The authors acknowledge that there are more comprehensive books on these concepts available, like Windows Internals (also by Mark Russinovich), so it wasn't their intention that this book cover the topics in depth. Instead they give nice, concise summaries of core concepts like Kernel vs. User Mode, Processes and Threads, and the Call Stack. The authors provide a perfect explanation of the above topics for understanding how the utilities interact with Windows. The second way in which this book differs from others (for learning about Windows) is that it is intimately connected with the fantastic set of utilities. Where some books rely on diagrams and maybe some screen-shots of some built-in MS utilities to show how Windows works, this one contains screen images for each GUI utility as well as the console output for command line utilities. In this way, one learns to use a utility that shows the workings of the operating system in real time. A great comprehensive book like Windows Internals, and a great practical utility guide like this book are perfect companions for one learning about the inner workings of MS Windows. Read more