Customer Reviews

Thread Time: The MultiThreaded Programming Guide

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

 

 

Having recently re-read this book, I find it's explanations of various concepts relatively clear, if a little verbose. The book is 50% of the time quite good at explaining something, and 50% of the time exceedingly dull and tedious, obviously large parts of boilerplate text must have been cutted and pasted into various parts of the text.

What the book does not give you, is an introduction to concurrent programming. This is a pity, because most programmers aren't especially well trained in tackling concurrent programming. The mindset involved is different, and formal proofs suddenly becomes more important than debugging.

To make matters worse, the examples in the book is completely and utterly useless. In the first half of the book, they typically exercise one API function at the time, with 5 lines of comments per api call. In the latter half, sometime, you can see a few API calls in sequence, but none of the examples in the book will help you getting ideas for how to structure a complete multithreaded application.

On the bright side, to someone already knowledgeable about concurrent programming, the discussions in the book of the same issues related to pthreads make it possible to gain a thorough understanding of how to program pthreads safely.

Would I recommend the book? Yes, I am not aware of that many other pthreads books, but this book clearly has a lot of useful content. But it certainly has a split personality. Half the time, targetting the idiot who can't even figure out how to call an api function given the prototype and a description of it's semantics, and half the time giving actual useful information on issues regarding the use of pthreads and its interaction with processes, signals, and other parts of the unix environment.

Best book I've seen on the subject of POSIX thread programming. My only criticism is that the examples are lame. They excercise the API calls described in the preceeding text without adding any helpful context, insight, or details.

The author would have done better to provide one or two fairly complex case studies as examples, with analysis of their design process and tradeoffs. Instead there are small examples of every little detail of the API, that they add nothing of value to the book.

That criticism aside, it is a well-written, useful book, which I highly recommend.

Pro:
An easy-to-read book meant for practitioners without missing basic multi-threading concepts.
Cons:
- I think they use some sort of scanner that treat tabs and spaces differently; Nothing wrong with that, is just that the code looks messy.
- While the book can be apply to any posix environment, the author was a little bit too comfortable with HP-Unix, again nothing wrong with that, but choosing an agnostic approach could it be the choice for a non-OS MT book.
- Several code examples didn't compile mostly by syntax errors... Not a big deal, but I didn't enjoy extra minutes/hours trying to find the problem of the code.
- Source code files are not standalone examples. I don't mind a code example using code from another file but the files aren't organized and their names aren't trivial so you have to do a brute-force look to each file until you find the code that your example is using.

Overall, even though, I only have one pro, I would recommend this book because I learned a lot from it and it is easy to read. While not a holy-grail, this are one of those that I wish I could it have this book in my undergrad years.

This seems to be the only good book I have come across on the basics of thread programming. Focused on POSIX, comparison is provided between process and threads, which slowly but surely convinces the reader the significance of using threads and also, when to use them. Finally, the best feature I liked was that each topic is discussed and then the use is illustrated by a small independent program (sometimes 'extern' functions have been used which might require use of a previous source code). Overall, best book I have come across for getting introduced to thread programming. If there are even better ones ( beginners level) I am interested to know.