7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
an elegant and enlightening formalism, March 6, 2000
This review is from: Communicating Sequential Processes (Prentice Hall International Series in Computing Science) (Hardcover)
An ALGEBRA for thinking about concurrency and nondeterminism in programs. The foundation of modern designs for communicating between threads.
An elegant and enlightening formalism for what you already know if you write multithreaded stuff that works. Feels just like structured programming did in the 70's: that being then the new formalism what you already knew if you wrote single-threaded stuff that really worked. Quoting from the forward by E. W. Dijkstra: "... the computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making ...".
Easier to read if you already have experience writing programs that write programs, but readable even if you flatly ignore all the academic computer science terms like "lambda expression" and "static binding". Most fun if you write the programs suggested in the exercises, of course.
Among the top five of my all-time favourite books on programming.
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