Product Description: The purpose of the book is to educate software professionals the techniques of multithreading programming, to show them how to use threads effectively to develop scaleable and parallel applications. Symmetric Multiprocessing machines (SMP) are becoming increasingly popular for many applications. Multithreading is the best technique available to developers to take advantage of the inherent parallelism of the SMP machines. The book starts with explaining SMP machines and discusses multithreading in general, and identifies the kinds of applications that can benefit from multithreading. This book explains in the clear and concise manner the techniques of multithreading programming on multiple platforms.
Good survey, but sloppy specifics. If what you are after is a survey of available mutli-threading support across several operating systems, then look no further. There is a great deal of information about how generic multithreading concepts map onto specific operating system features. In addition, the author details where different OS versions implement different behavior, and indicates OS's where some techniques are poorly suited.
However, if you want to learn the multi-threading support of any specific OS, this book is a poor choice. The examples are extremely sloppy; almost half of them are syntactially incorrect. For example, 7 is substituted for >, == is exchanged with =, and {} braces are missing. Many examples are incorrect even after fixing the syntax. Examples that might be correct contain techniques not explained in the prose.
I suggest using this book as cross-OS survey of multithreading support, and buy something else for the details.
Great for cross platform programming This book focuses on the thread APIs on POSIX and WIN32 (+ others). It shows also how some features can be emulated using the primitives. A great timesaver is the discussion of the differences between the POSIX drafts. This won't teach you thread design, but it is a very useful reference to the API's because you can look up very quickly whether a certain feature is available on your platform(s) of choice.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
