Customer Reviews

Professional Multicore Programming: Design and Implementation for C++ Developers (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

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

 

 

This book is a complete waste of money. When I came across this book on the Amazon website, I thought it would be similar to "The Art of Multiprocessor Programming" by Herlihy et al., for C++ programmers and with a more practical (and less theoretical) approach (because its "Programmer to Programmer"). But this book comes nowhere near that one.
The content is *extremely* light and *extremely* superficial. Authors discuss topics like threads, processes, etc. in over 100 pages, including sub-topics like "monitoring processes with the ps utility", "killing a process - exit(), abort(), kill() calls". Seriously??? Does a multicore book aimed at professional programmers need to discuss this over 100 pages? Topics like mutexes, semaphores have been discussed only at an *introductory* level.

Issues like ABA problem, atomic variables, memory fences, etc are not mentioned even once!!!

The worst part is that the book spends close to 300 pages discussing UML and POSIX API's. This kind of information can be readily accessed on the internet.
I wish I had not bought this one.

UPDATE (29AUG2011):
As I learn more and more about multicore programming from other resources, my disdain for this book continues to grow. To be specific, things that are missing from this book which *must* be included in any book on this topic (apart from what I have already mentioned above):
- Lock free and wait free concepts and their advantages.
- Role of caches (false sharing, etc)
- Some introduction to NUMA architecture.
- Fine-grained locking

At most, what you will learn from this book is how to wrap boost::thread in your own class for OO programming and that's it!!!

Professional Multicore Programming is covers lots of great stuff. The book gives you a great intro into parallel computing, then talks about using processes and threads to achieve parallelism. The examples focus on POSIX compliant systems such as Linux.

The book discusses Sun's UltraSparc T1 CPU and IBM's Cell Broadband Engine CPU and does a good job of explaining their architecture. I especially liked Appendix B where they explain 23 concurrency models. There is also a comprehensive POSIX process and threading reference section that comes in handy.

Excellent introduction to multi-core and parallel programming. It really seems that the autors had the hands-on experience to write what is relevant to introduce the multi-core programming.

If you don't know what the POSIX library is, it is the library that is used by unix operating systems. So windows can't run them.

If you are looking for coding examples in a windows environment, then buy another book.

I was fairly sure this would be a good book just based on the cover.
I mean.. how could it not be with two cool dudes in sunglasses on the cover? Seriously, how could it not be?

One star deduction for the obnoxious red.