Professional Parallel Programming with C#: Master Parallel Extensions with .NET 4 (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) [Paperback]

Gastón Hillar (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0470495995 | ISBN-13: 978-0470495995 | Publication Date: December 21, 2010 | Edition: 1

Expert guidance for those programming today’s dual-core processors PCs

As PC processors explode from one or two to now eight processors, there is an urgent need for programmers to master concurrent programming. This book dives deep into the latest technologies available to programmers for creating professional parallel applications using C#, .NET 4, and Visual Studio 2010. The book covers task-based programming, coordination data structures, PLINQ, thread pools, asynchronous programming model, and more. It also teaches other parallel programming techniques, such as SIMD and vectorization.

• Teaches programmers professional-level, task-based, parallel programming with C#, .NET 4, and Visual Studio 2010
• Covers concurrent collections, coordinated data structures, PLINQ, thread pools, asynchronous programming model, Visual Studio 2010 debugging, and parallel testing and tuning
• Explores vectorization, SIMD instructions, and additional parallel libraries

Master the tools and technology you need to develop thread-safe concurrent applications for multi-core systems, with Professional Parallel Programming with C#.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Gain a solid understanding of parallel programming with C# 4, Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET 4 Framework

Are you maximizing the processing power in your multi-core computer systems? With this resource, you discover how to do exactly that, while gaining insight into concurrent programming with tasks to create professional parallel applications using C# 4, .Net 4, and Visual Studio 2010. You learn other parallel programming techniques, including modern single instruction, multiple data instructions and vectorization. Plus, you explore the possibilities offered by modern parallel libraries and advanced Intel tools with C#. Use the new lightweight coordination structures to tackle the most complex concurrent programming problems and develop your own customized solutions.

Professional Parallel Programming with C#:

• Focuses on creating scalable and reliable parallelized designs targeting the new Task Parallel Library and .NET 4

• Walks you through imperative data parallelism, imperative task parallelism, concurrent collections, and coordination data structures

• Describes advanced declarative data parallelism with PLINQ

• Describes how to debug anonymous methods, tasks, and threads by using the new Visual Studio® 2010 parallel debugging features

• Demonstrates how to partition data sources to load-balance the workload among diverse tasks and threads

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About the Author

Gastón C. Hillar is an independent software consultant who has been researching parallel programming, multiprocessor, and multicore since 1997. He has years of experience designing and developing diverse types of complex parallelized solutions that take advantage of multiple processing cores with C# and .NET Framework.

Product Details

• Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: Wrox; 1 edition (December 21, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470495995
• ISBN-13: 978-0470495995
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #334,486 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #66 in Books > Computers & Technology > Hardware > Parallel Processing Computers

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good start for parallel programming, February 21, 2011

By 

CHEN WEI WU - See all my reviews

This review is from: Professional Parallel Programming with C#: Master Parallel Extensions with .NET 4 (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

Author put lot effort to explain the theories and practices of parallel. It Let me get the more and more knowledges about the parallel programming from sequential programming background. Samples are easy to read and understand. It is really a good start book for C# parallel people.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Just average, November 10, 2011

By 

Timmy_A - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Professional Parallel Programming with C#: Master Parallel Extensions with .NET 4 (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

After reading Richter CLR via C# where several last chapters are dedicated to threading and TPL I wanted to extend my knowlegde. This 500+ pages book looked like good option. Unfortunatelly number of pages can be very deceiving. Richter's 250 pages text was really comprehensive, full of excellent explanations in extreme depth, but still easy to follow. Hillar's text is much sparser, with for instance complete source code listings on 2-3 or more pages. Many exmaples contain similar code to each other, but the book has full listings of all exmaples instead of short snippets with modified lines. The book also contains about 150 figures which make book much thicker than it actually is.

This book is the high level intro to TPL, parallel algorithms and patterns. For instance author didn't even mention Thread class as a primary class for threading in .NET. Thread class and classic synchronization primitives are treated as some kind of legacy technology which I think is controversial - at least. Knowledge of 'classic' .NET threading model is, I think still essential to fully understand threading under .NET.

Much better part of the book is author's effort to explain parallel algorithms and patterns. This was the most useful aspect of Professional Parallel Programming with C#.

I think if you are looking for high level intro to TPL, this book can be useful, but if you want to fully utilize all parallel capabilities of CLR, then read Richter's CLR via C# 3rd ed. (or Joe's Duffy Concurrent programming on Windows). You will learn much more in greater depth.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great coverage, April 6, 2011

By 

Dustin Davis "Programmers Unlimited" (California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Professional Parallel Programming with C#: Master Parallel Extensions with .NET 4 (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

I wasn't sure what to think about this book when I got it, but as soon as I started reading it I knew that it was going to be a great reference.

The author starts by explaining that parallel programming is not going to solve every performance problem. In fact, it won't solve most of them. The book attempts to clearly explain how to determine if/when parallel programming is going to be the right solution. The author provides a lot of data to explain what type of gains you can expect (or not). In fact, the author wanted to make sure this point was so clearly understood that it was almost annoying.

The book starts by going over the TPL, PLINQ, Exception handling in parallel code and parallel friendly collections. Later on you get coverage of the Visual Studio parallel debugging tools and a look at how thread pooling works in .NET 4.

Overall this book does a great job of explaining parallel theories and how the TPL works and and you can get up and running with just the first 4-5 chapters, but you get so much more advanced information later in the book. It's really worth keeping around.