Multithreading Applications in Win32: The Complete Guide to Threads (Paperback)

~ (Author), Robert Wiener (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Multithreading--dividing an application into multiple independent streams of execution--is a powerful but potentially intimidating programming technique. Multithreading Applications in Win32: The Complete Guide to Threads teaches you how to build multithreaded applications step by step, starting with simple examples and gradually introducing complicating factors and the Win32 APIs you'll need to deal with them. After you've mastered the basic concepts, you'll learn exactly how to implement multithreading applications using C, C++, and MFC, plus specific applications of multithreading on the Win32 platform. The entire book maintains a conversational tone that helps make potentially complex topics understandable.

Product Description

Programmers will get hands-on experience in when and how to use multithreading, together with expert advice and working examples in C++ and MFC.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (December 29, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201442345
• ISBN-13: 978-0201442342
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #525,570 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential Reading, August 29, 2000

By	Mark Jones (Bournemouth, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This book has been essential for writing our multi-threading, commercial apps. The material begins by providing an explanation for why threads are useful, and follows with a thorough explanation of how to synchronise the activities of many threads. Synchronisation is perhaps the biggest obstacle to producing a working multi-threaded app. I found the most useful chapter to be 10: Threads in MFC. This shows how to create worker threads, derived from CWinThread, instead of calling AfxBeginThread(). This allows you to design classes that represent your threads in a more object-oriented way. The book is clearly typeset, with good explanations of both good technique and the common mistakes that can easily be made when starting out. The FAQ section also helped with common problems that turned up.

I recommend a good understanding of C++ to get the most out of this book, though this isn't essential.

In my opinion, this is *the* book for understanding the theory and practice involved in Multithreaded apps for Win 32. Fortunately, I found this book before writing any multi-threaded apps and I cannot recommend it enough!

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book but as always be weary..., January 16, 2000

By	Andrew "webflyer99" (NY) - See all my reviews

I just started reading the book and the content is presented in a nice, progressive manner building up from the simple to the more complex. I just hope the author's discussions of threading is better than his coding. e.g. The sample code at the end of the second chapter doesn't do a good job of cleaning up - the font created is never destroyed and the bitmap created should be destroyed if printing to the printer. Also, most authors/publishers have an errata page for their books but none can be found for this one so you're left on your own to discover any bugs/typos.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This material is still relevent, even when using .NET, September 14, 2005

By	G. Vignes "G" (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This material is still relevent, even when using .NET. The discussion of Win32 multithreading transcends any particular development environment used with a Windows 32 bit environment.

The key idea behind this book is getting correct, reproducible results with windows multithreaded applications. Multithreaded applications are very hard to get right and even harder to properly test. The author explains the many sources of problems and how to avoid them.

In order to understand this book's code samples, you will have to understand the Win32 API and code written in Visual C++ for Windows NT. It is important to see examples of these concepts in code.