Customer Reviews

Multithreaded Programming With Windows Nt

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book offers good solutions, overall. But it's advice is ocasionally flawed fatally. Within the first couple chapters, for example, the authors write all of their examples to call TerminateThread(), which is a fatal and unforgivable mistake that results in nothing more than unstability. Worse, throught the book, they code threads that use the C runtime libraries but start the threads with the CreateThread() API--that causes the runtime libraries to not correctly initialize or shutdown in all cases, and that results in memory leaks and unstability. While the authors clearly treat deadlocks and thread programming models, their implementations are still mortally flawed. A score of 10 for great abstract descriptions plus a score of 1 for terribly poor implementations and samples results in a score of five.

This book took me from knowing nothing about thread programming to writing professional mulithreaded programs very quickly. If you are tasked to write multithreaded programs under Windows NT (like I was) this book will give you a flying start.

A very well written book on multithreading. Though this book focuses on NT multthreading model, it will serve as a good reference for people working on UNIX as well. It is written in a very simple language which makes the reading very easy and interesting. Coming from UNIX background, I would have liked to have a more elaborate comparision of NT thread interface with UNIX (such as Solaris) one. But in no way this missing feature diminishes the value of this book. A must have!!

I found this book to be the best primer for someone who has not done any multithreaded programming. The examples are concise and straight to the point. I read this book in two days . This book was very similar to an Operating Systems course that I had taken where I learned about concurrent programming; e.g., the "Reader-writers" and the "Dinning Philosphers" problems, deadlocks/starvation, race conditions, and how to synchronize events, etc.. In a world where getting information/samples to show "how to" do multithreaded programming, this book will give you a starting point to build on. "Highly recommended".

Any time you are faced with multi-threaded design issues you should have this book nearby. The main topics are exactly the types of threading issues professional programmers face. Computer science concepts such as monitors and deadlock are explained and useful examples are given. Although the book is targeted towards NT, it is fully applicable to any modern OS, including UNIX

Beware of this text, despite it's recent publication date of 1996 it only covers Windows NT 3.5 multithread API. If this is what you are looking for then purchase this book!