Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Lays a Solid Foundation
Comment: I think the thing that's impressed me the most while reading through this book is just how hellishly complicated these operating systems really are - the number of situations that they have to handle - things they have to take into account - and the co-operation, co-ordination, and communication between the varies components is nothing short of phenominal.
So to have a hope in hell of getting to grips with a beast like this, one really needs to start with solid foundations & accurate overviews - and that's what this book does. In fact, I believe that it's "standard issue" for new Microsoft employees. From the solid-foundation, the book branches out into all of the major areas that you'd expect.
In all honesty it's NOT a "casual read" for anyone just getting into the IT "game", but for those (programmers, IT consultants, Network Engineers) who make the effort to digest it's contents, the payoff will be a MUCH deeper understanding of what's going on "under the hood" - information I've already put to good use in solving a relatively bizarre issue relatively quickly.
I suspect that for many who's livelihood comes from working in these kinds of areas, the return on investment would come PDQ.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: In-depth coverage of the Windows Core
Comment: This book does a good job of walking you through the internals of threads, synchronization, memory, and the IO manager. However, it does NOT cover bus-related driver technologies (PCI, USB, 1394, ...). A good book to understand the Windows core, but I would have liked some USB and PCI internals to help driver developers produce higher quality USB and PCI drivers. A "theory" book that I will read once and refer back to infrequently. After reading it once, you can find much of what you need in the WDM header files or WinDBG.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive, but with some reservations with experiments.
Comment: An excellent coverage of the Windows architecture. Very strong on using tools to examine the state of a machine, from the kernel debugger to the many tools written by one of the authors. Of course, Windows being closed-source, it isn't possible to show any of the source code (or pointers thereto) that allow us to see what really happens under the hood.
I originally gave this a 5* review. Now I'm downgrading it to 4*. At the time that I read the book, my PC had a rather broken Windows 2000 installation on it, and I did not attempt any of the "experiments" that are spread throughout the book. Since then I've upgraded to Windows XP, and after that I went back to try the "experiments". I found them hard to follow, mainly because they repeatedly refer to apps that are part of either Windows NT 4, Windows 2000, or their respective Resource Kits. Some can be downloaded from the MS web site, but not all. The result was that I found that it was inpossible to run 1/4 to 1/3 of the "experiments".
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very in-depth!
Comment: pretty amazing book over all. you'll need some pretty deep background knowledge to understand this book. and on the bad side some of the wording is very tricky, id dare say that some words are left out. there are parts when he talks about "objects", "object headers", "object body" and then goes on a bit, and refers to "object" when im PRETTY sure he should have said "object body". i catch my self tripping up over things like that a bit too often.. but... again.. an AMAZING book.. i dont think any other book will go this deep in to windows..
Customer Rating:
Summary: Well-segmented, very informative, and an excellent reference
Comment: As an experienced UNIX device driver developer, I was looking for reference material on writing drivers for Windows. Recent books on Windows device driver development seemed much more sparse than I was expecting. After using this book, I think it may simply be due the fact that "Microsoft Windows Internals" is such an excellent reference.
The chapters are segregated in such a way that makes it easy to obtain the specific information you are looking for. If you're a novice and are just looking for a How-To book, you would probably do better to consult the MSDN library. However, even for a beginner this book would be good as a reference, and it is phenomenal as a reference for the experienced developer. For myself, I found it very easy to transition into the Windows world from my UNIX universe with this read.
If you aren't particularly familiar with Windows systems development, the first couple of chapters are quintessential, actually. They do an excellent job of pointing to references for tools and reading material which will help your comprehension of the material and your ability to use it. For example, even one of the later chapters pointed me to the exact DDK I needed for the problem I was trying to solve. At the point I read the book, I had no idea there was a separate DDK for that particular problem. This is one of the few books where the informational sidebars are truly informational.
All in all, if you're doing any kind of Windows system internals development, whether device driver level or just trying to understand how parts of the kernel work, this is an excellent reference. Highly recommended!
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