Customer Reviews

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

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This is a great book, but it is not for the faint of heart. It's a high level programming book geared towards teaching programmers how to best manage parallel programming techniques. I've dabbled a bit in background processes, but that is nothing compared what's discussed in this book. And just reading the examples are not enough. Putting these concepts into your own code is where the understanding is going to come in and the mythical light bulb is going to suddenly turn on for you. If you have already started working with Parallel Programming, this book will increase your skills and help you master the subject!

It appears that .NET Framework is trying to make parallel programming simpler but this author is on a train to make the concepts appear difficult.

I would recommend freely available whitepaper on MSDN site "Parallel Programming with Microsoft .NET: Design Patterns for Decomposition and Coordination on Multicore Architectures"

I bought this book after reviewing some free pages. Personally, I feel this not the book for folks who want to associate theory with real time problem. This is more of crop from research papers with lot of images (though an image save thousand words ), which is not needed at all. There are few core information's TPL which are partially addressed or not even tried at all.

I was able to get this review since I read other two books on same topic.

Decision left to you.