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Summary: The Best Book , but not for Beginers ............
Review: The good book for expert programmers ....
Rating: 
Summary: practical, goes beyond the API
Review: The second edition clearly distinguishes between Java 2 and previous versions, and includes valuable information about the differences between Java VM's and how to code around them in a portable way. The explanation of how to safely stop a thread should be useful. Could be improved by more information about the performance of Java VM's under heavy load.
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Summary: The 3rd Edition, book or software, finally gets it right.
Review: The sub-title of this book is Understanding and Mastering Concurrent Programming and I think that this pretty well sums up what it's all about. In perhaps its simplest and most obvious task consider a word processing system. Periodically you want to save what you've typed. So you hit Control-S or whatever, and then you wait until the save is completed before you can continue typing. If the save routine and the data input routine were written using threads, both could run at once and you wouldn't have to wait to continue typing. That's a pretty trivial example compared to something like a web server where you get a request, prepare a page to be displayed and then send it out to the browser that made the request. If this had to be done sequentially, the resulting server would be slow; very, very slow. And since most communications channels are so much slower than the processor, you'd best have several threads running just to handle the transmission of the page.
These are simple to understand threads. And the first one, saving and typing are fairly simple to program. To get suitable performance out of a web server, you want some pretty good programmers. No one is going to claim that programming in threads is the easiest kind of program to write. But it can be argued that programming threads in Java is easier than just about any programming language. This is especially true with the additions made in Java 2 Standard Edition Version 5.0 (J2SE 5.0).
This book is not intended to be your first Java book. You need to know the Java syntax, philosophies, and have some experience in programming. But having said that, most of the Java programming books skip over threads or treat them very superfically. This book picks up where those books leave off. It's intended for the intermediate level programmer up to advanced. And it's an O'Reilly book, they don't do bad stuff.
Rating: 
Summary: bad introductory book on Java Threads
Review: This book doesn't explain the threading concept. It has a few introductory chapters that explains how to create and spawn a new thread. The rest is examples of using threads. May be this book is intended for Java programmers who already know thread and want know the use of it. If you want to learn thread, I would recomend buying "Jav Thread Programming" from Paul Hyde.
Rating:
Summary: Extremely dissapointed
Review: This book is indeed the worst book I have ever read from O'Reilly concerning Java programming. In fact I am considering donating my copy to a local garbage dump.The examples are not relevent to real life programming. And worst of all, after spending much time and energy painfully plowing through their poor explanations, they end the excercise by telling me that what they just taught me "won't work". Spending most of my time learning what "won't work" is not how I normally learn. In fact, I don't think that is how most people normally learn. It only succeeded in frustrating and discouraging me. Just tell me what will work and I will learn it and we will all be happy.
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Summary: Not a bad introduction to threading in Java.
Review: This book is not academic, nor does it offer a very rigorous approach to the subject of Concurrent Programming. This book will not work for everyone. However, I believe it does offer basic, solid threading to many new people for most everyday programming tasks. Threading is not an incredibly difficult or complex topic. Threading is an advanced programming topic. Solid programming knowledge is prerequiste. If you already are proficient in writing threaded code in other languages, I would not recommend (buying) this book. Simply reading the interface for Thread and Runnable may suffice. Java's threading support is quite elegant; you shouldn't have major problems figuring things out. Threading is kind of confusing at first because it involves calling procedures for the sole purpose of timing. That is, a correctly written program will use a set of procedures in such a way that when a call returns, it will be safe to access shared data. This book is not concise as it could be, but if you are a reasonably experienced and intellegent programmer, you should be able to handle most basic sychronization tasks after reading this book. It is written in style that goes like this: 1. It introduces a problem. 2. It briefly shows a solution a student might suggest. 3. It then explains why this doesn't work. 4. It finally explains the proper solution. You need to understand why something is correct or not, not only how to do it correctly. Whether or not you like the particular approach used in this book is a matter of personal preference. After reading this book, I would recommend a good textbook on concurrent programming to further and more rigorously study issues of sychronization, starvation, control, and deadlock.
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Summary: An excellent introduction to java threads
Review: This book is really the first thorough discussion of multithreading in Java. Several other how-to Java books present thread creation and synchronization, but only "Java Threads" covers the details thoroughly. Furthermore, the book also covers thread scheduling - a topic that multithreaded application must take into account for. Lastly, the book also presents the security differences between applets and standalone applications. The best Java threading book out there!
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Summary: Great Intro to threads.
Review: This book is, by far, the best introduction to threads for java programmers. In fact, the only other book devoted to threads - "Concurrent Programming" - is way to abstract, dense, and unreadable as an *intro* to java threads. Java Threads on the other hand is excellent both as a tutorial and as a reference for thread related design patterns. In short: Highly recommended.... snowscan100@yahoo.com
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Summary: The only book you need to write threaded programs in Java
Review: This book provides a thorough yet concise explanation of threaded programming in Java.
Beyond that, it explains in clear, understandable language many of the difficult concepts related to threaded programming in general, making it an
excellent book for programmers who have never done any threaded programming. Readers will be able to begin writing threaded programs immediately.
The extensive code examples, diagrams, sidebars,
and Q&A sections add greatly to the reader's
understanding of the complex issues.
I recommend this book highly.
Rating:
Summary: Could be much better
Review: This is a prettry decent book on threads, but I frankly found it to be a little flat. The writing doesn't exactly pop and it is a pretty small book. I think they could easily write a book about twice the size and cover the topic entirely.
However, if you are new to multithreading, or at least new to Java threads, this is a great intorduction to the subject. And it is very difficult to find a lot of information on Java threads anyway, which is why I bought this book in the first place. There are some very practical code examples too, including a round robin scheduler.
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