in reply to Windows for Unix Geeks?

You may like something by Mark Minasi. He's very much an NT guy, not from a *nix background, but he does know a little about *nix, and, more importantly, he tends to explain things at the conceptual level, rather than just show you pretty pictures of windows and tell you what to click, like so many Windows-related books are wont to do. I perused the first parts of his Mastering Windows 2000 Server a couple of years ago and found it engaging and informative.

However, I can tell you just as a general rule that, moving from *nix to Windows, forgetting most of what you know is a good starting point. Even things that are similar tend to be *deceptively* similar, on the surface, with major conceptual differences lurking beneath the veneer. NT is not quite as out-there different as VMS, but it's most assuredly not Unix.

Notably, NT-based versions of Windows are considerably less Unix-like than Windows 9x, conceptually. Sure, NT has memory protection and file ownership and stuff, features that Unix has and Windows 9x lacks, but these are just features, not paradigmatic issues.

The most completely *alien* stuff in Windows (from a *nix-background perspective) is the networking stuff. Everything you know about networking, just check it at the door. Yes, Windows now uses TCP/IP at the network and transport layer, but the similarities end there. Even very common networking terms like "host", "client", and especially "domain" don't necessarily mean quite what you think they mean, and the differences in terminology are just the tip of the iceberg.

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Re^2: Windows for Unix Geeks?
by ambrus (Abbot) on Jan 13, 2006 at 18:24 UTC

    Windows 9x lacks memory protection? I never knew that.

      Windows 9x lacks memory protection? I never knew that.

      Yes. Aside from NT and the unices, most consumer-grade operating systems lack memory protection, especially most of the ones that were available in the twentieth century. Windows 9x does at least have pre-emptive multitasking; Windows 3.x and all MacOS versions up through 9 have neither. Mac OS X and all versions of NT have both, as do the free unices.

      Of course, there's memory protection and then there's memory protection. I suspect that in a few years people will look back at most current systems and say, "They didn't have user-mode drivers or partition the memory for each process into separate code and data areas? I never knew that."