When the story is about L4, and the reader is interested in operating systems, the answer to this conundrum is "very yes". L4 is an incredibly simple, elegant, and important OS design. I have a hard time reading about it and not wanting to play around with it (thankfully, I've had the opportunity on projects).
Two simple uses for L4: first, as a bare-bones but coherent, complete OS for a purpose-built device; second, as the basis for another OS built on top of it as a "personality". L4 implements most of the hairy parts of an OS (perhaps modulo filesystems), allowing you to build the upper-level OS in terms of L4 abstractions.
This paper is a survey of the last 20 years of that microkernel design, which has been picked up and evolved by several teams. One way to approach it would be to read an introduction to one of the original L4 OS's, and then read this one to see which concepts survived into 2014.
Two simple uses for L4: first, as a bare-bones but coherent, complete OS for a purpose-built device; second, as the basis for another OS built on top of it as a "personality". L4 implements most of the hairy parts of an OS (perhaps modulo filesystems), allowing you to build the upper-level OS in terms of L4 abstractions.
This paper is a survey of the last 20 years of that microkernel design, which has been picked up and evolved by several teams. One way to approach it would be to read an introduction to one of the original L4 OS's, and then read this one to see which concepts survived into 2014.