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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful Book!, January 4, 2001
I just wanted to express my sincerest appreciation for this book. It has really helped me build a solid foundation of threading in Java. The examples are easy to follow and the way that the author refers to the code line numbers in the text is very helpful. Concepts that I never quite grasped were explained in such a simple manner that I was left thinking "It's so easy! Why did I have trouble understanding this before!?". I wanted to point out a few sections of the book that were especially helpful: 1) Synchronized Statement Block (pg 144-146). I have attained my Java certification at the programmer level, so I already knew how to use the synchronized keyword as method modifiers and in blocks. However, this section of the book really cleared up the concept of what it actually means to get a synchronized lock on an object. This line, on page 144, made it all clear: "... obj is a reference to the object whose object-level lock must be acquired before entering the block of code." 2) I can't find the page number, but the book makes a reference to the point that when two threads are running you can't be sure when the thread scheduler will remove it from the running state and place another thread into the running state. This really helped me understand how multi-threading programs work in general. Instead of talking about threads as slices of time (as some texts do), it was much easier to understand the concept of the almighty thread scheduler taking individual threads on or off the running state and that when they would be placed back into the running state, they would continue from where they left off before. 3) Deadlocks (pp 160-165). I have heard of this situation before but never really understood how a situation like this could arise. The diagram on page 161 and sample program on page 161 really brought the point home. 4) The Wait/Notify Mechanism (pp 168). The example on page 169 helped me understand why wait( ), notify( ), and notifyAll( ) are part of the Object class. I often wondered why these methods weren't part of the Thread class. This entire chapter was a pleasure to read because it clearly explained how wait and notify work and how they should to be used. The timing diagrams were also very helpful. 5) Threads and Swing (Chapter 9). The motivation example (page 232) for why it is sometimes necessary to create a new thread in a Swing application really helped me get a better understanding of the event dispatching thread. This made it very easy to understand SwingUtilities.invokeAndWait( ) and SwingUtilities.invokeLater( ). I have a few suggestions for future editions of the book. The first suggestion is for providing exercises at the end of each chapter. Or perhaps there could be a Part 3 to the book which lists multi-threaded programming projects that readers can try. For example, I wrote the CubbyHole program on page 192 by myself, before looking at the code in the book. The second suggestion is to have more information about debugging in multi-threaded programs. A listing of the techniques as well as the common tools used would be most helpful. The third suggestion is to provide some examples when you would use ThreadLocal and InheritableThreadLocal in the real world. Thank you, Mr. Hyde, for writing such a beautiful book!
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