From the Preface

I think the animal on this cover, a common palm civet, is applicable to the subject of this book. I knew nothing about this animal until I saw the cover, so I looked it up. Common palm civets are considered pests because they defecate all over attics and make loud noises fighting with each other at the most inopportune times. Common palm civets enjoy eating coffee cherries, and they pass the coffee beans through. Kopi luwak, one of the most expensive coffees in the world, is made from the coffee beans extracted from civet excretions. According to the Specialty Coffee Association of America, “It just tastes bad.”

This makes the common palm civet a perfect mascot for concurrent and multithreaded development. To the uninitiated, concurrency and multithreading are undesirable. They make well-behaved code act up in the most horrendous ways. Race conditions & whatnot cause loud crashes. Some have gone so far as to declare “threads are evil” and avoid concurrency completely.

There are a handful of developers who have developed a taste for concurrency and use it without fear; but most developers have been burned in the past by concurrency, and that experience has left a bad taste in their mouth.

However, for modern applications, concurrency is quickly becoming a requirement. Users these days expect fully responsive interfaces, and server applications are having to scale to unprecedented levels. Concurrency addresses both of these trends.

Fortunately, there are many modern libraries that make concurrency much easier! Parallel processing & asynchronous programming are no longer exclusively the domains of wizards. By raising the level of abstraction, these libraries make responsive and scalable application development a realistic goal for every developer. If you have been burned in the past, when concurrency was extremely difficult, then I encourage you to give it another try with modern tools. We can probably never call concurrency easy, but it sure isn’t as hard as it used to be!

Who Should Read This Book

This book is written for developers who want to learn modern approaches to concurrency. I do assume that you’ve got a fair amount of .NET experience, including an understanding of generic collections, enumerables, and LINQ. I do not expect that you have any multithreading or asynchronous programming knowledge.

If you do have some experience in those areas, you may still find this book helpful because it introduces newer libraries that are safer and easier to use. Concurrency is useful for any kind of application. It doesn’t matter whether you work on desktop, mobile, or server applications; these days concurrency is practically a requirement across the board.

You can use the recipes in this book to make user interfaces more responsive and servers more scalable. We are already at the point where concurrency is ubiquitous, and understanding these techniques and their uses is essential knowledge for the professional developer.