Scott J. Norton, Mark D. DiPasquale
List Price: $49.99
By: Prentice Hall PTR
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3
Average rating: 4.5 of 5
You need another book as well... 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.
Having recently re-read this book, I find it's explanations of various concepts relatively clear, if a little verbose. The book is 50% of the time quite good at explaining something, and 50% of the time exceedingly dull and tedious, obviously large parts of boilerplate text must have been cutted and pasted into various parts of the text.What the book does not give you, is an introduction to concurrent programming. This is a pity, because most programmers aren't especially well trained in tackling concurrent programming. The mindset involved is different, and formal proofs suddenly becomes more important than debugging.
To make matters worse, the examples in the book is completely and utterly useless. In the first half of the book, they typically exercise one API function at the time, with 5 lines of comments per api call. In the latter half, sometime, you can see a few API calls in sequence, but none of the examples in the book will help you getting ideas for how to structure a complete multithreaded application.
On the bright side, to someone already knowledgeable about concurrent programming, the discussions in the book of the same issues related to pthreads make it possible to gain a thorough understanding of how to program pthreads safely.
Would I recommend the book? Yes, I am not aware of that many other pthreads books, but this book clearly has a lot of useful content. But it certainly has a split personality. Half the time, targetting the idiot who can't even figure out how to call an api function given the prototype and a description of it's semantics, and half the time giving actual useful information on issues regarding the use of pthreads and its interaction with processes, signals, and other parts of the unix environment.
Editorial Review:
The easiest way for programmers to learn important new multi-threading techniques that are increasingly important in Windows NT/95, UNIX, POSIX, and other application development.Each concept in the book is illustrated with a picture, making this an exceptionally easy-to-understand guide. The book introduces the process model, the thread model, and basic thread management functions. Learn how to synchronize and schedule threads. In a Programming Guidelines chapter, learn the basic do's and don'ts of multithreaded programming. The book includes extensive examples, exercises and references, including manual pages, debugging advice, and a CD-ROM loaded with practical information.This book is an effective introduction to multithreading for both professional programmers and students.
