Customer Reviews

Threads Primer: A Guide to Multithreaded Programming

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

 

 

This was an excellent book with detailed coverage of threads programming even down to how various hardware architectures affect multithreaded program behavior. However there is a more current edition under a different name (Multithreaded Programming with Pthreads) by the same authors that is more current that I would recommend instead (everything in this book is in the newer book).

I would describe the books as concise, precise and extremely readable. The authors use fluid language and use the right technical terms in the right places. One of the best Computer Science books I have ever read. Definitely a good reference(though the book is not a comprehensive Operating Systems book) for a beginner who is looking to gain conceptual knowledge about Operating Systems in general and Multithreading in particular.

This book, true to other Solaris and Sun manual style, is concise and to the point. This is probably the best introduction to Threads Programming in existence. Lewis and Berg's style is almost reassuring as you learn the basics to threads programming, even for non-Solaris users. If the world of computing and how-to books were written in this style, the reader could learn anything.

A well written book that clearly explains the concepts and issues of thread programming. It provides the neccessary background information to understand the overall thread context and then describes the specific issues in turn. It does not over whelm the reader with technical details but concentrates on one issue at a time. It's a great book that I highly recommend!

This book was written in the mid 90s (an era of 300Mhz, single-core CPUs) which is an eternity in computer terms. While a lot of the theoretical discussion in the book is quite meaningful and relevant, the code examples--referring mostly to an ancient version of Solaris -- are badly out of date. No mention is made of linux, windows 7, or OSX, for example. The book predates both multi-core computers and hyperthreading. My hope in purchasing this book was to get up to speed quickly on modern multithreaded coding techniques using modern languages available to me and I haven't been able to achieve that at all. This book might be important historically and does provide some interesting detail about theoretical aspects of multithreaded programming (at least circa 1996), but I would encourage anyone who's new to threads to find a more recent book.