Foundations of Multithreaded, Parallel, and Distributed

Rating:
Summary: I've never read anything worse than this in any subject ever
Review: I've read a few books on computer science and mathematics, being a university student in both subjects. However, I've never read anything nearly as conjested as this book. Basically its 665 pages of randomly mixed crap. I wonder if Amazon is going to censor this review, still this is what I think about this book.

Many parts of this books shows that the author has a very poor understanding of mathematics, logical deduction and also pays to attention to details. Further he seems to have quite a bit of flawed intuition about programs/processes and threads. Okay that might be harsh but atleast he has no ability to communicate his understanding anyway so...

More specifically I disagree with the following things;
The author repeats definitions (sometimes three or more times!).
The author does not explain his weird pseudo-code notation which I additionally think is counter-intuitive. He presents many copies of the same snippet with the first few versions beeing incorrect and the versions only differ my a few lines. Great way to take of two whole pages with minimal actual information content.

The one thing that made be go online and write this was page 73 (i've not read futher and i'm not sure i'm going to either) where the author delivers a lengthy insult to ones intellect by telling you that a program is BAD if any possible trace of execution leave the program in a BAD state. Further he continues to write that GOOD is equivalent to BAD, and then uses these two concepts as if they were each others logical negations.

Rating:
Summary: an excellent intro to medium book on parallel programming
Review: The book provides all material needed for a beginner to easily acquire knowledge required for development and beginner's research in the field of parallel computation. It's written though not for a beginner in programming, solid basics and initial knowledge of OS internals are prerequisites. I found it's easy to read and understand with a mass of useful examples and with coverage of MPI and Java. This was especially important to since it bridges the theory in the earlier sections with practical implementations using production environment tools. In overall I strongly recommend it for those who are new to the field. For a more deep discussion on parallel algorithms one may want to look at F.T. Leighton's "Intro to Parallel Algorithms and Architectures: Arrays, Trees, Hypercubes" - that one is much more technical though.