Customer Reviews

Multithreading Programming Techniques (J. Ranade Workstation Series)

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

 

 

If what you are after is a survey of available mutli-threading support across several operating systems, then look no further. There is a great deal of information about how generic multithreading concepts map onto specific operating system features. In addition, the author details where different OS versions implement different behavior, and indicates OS's where some techniques are poorly suited.

However, if you want to learn the multi-threading support of any specific OS, this book is a poor choice. The examples are extremely sloppy; almost half of them are syntactially incorrect. For example, 7 is substituted for >, == is exchanged with =, and {} braces are missing. Many examples are incorrect even after fixing the syntax. Examples that might be correct contain techniques not explained in the prose.

I suggest using this book as cross-OS survey of multithreading support, and buy something else for the details.

This book focuses on the thread APIs on POSIX and WIN32 (+ others). It shows also how some features can be emulated using the primitives. A great timesaver is the discussion of the differences between the POSIX drafts. This won't teach you thread design, but it is a very useful reference to the API's because you can look up very quickly whether a certain feature is available on your platform(s) of choice.