Rating: 
Summary: An Excellent Book!!
Review: An excellent book that introduces multithreading in a planned manner. The book starts with a good introduction to concepts of multitasking operating systems and of multithreading. It then explains the underlying principals of threads and its lifecycle and then goes onto advanced topics such as scheduling, synchronization, libraries etc. Of interest were the kernel and thread scheduling models. Also, a good comparison of Win32, POSIX v/s Java API is presented in most of the chapters. I did not come across a book that introduces multithreading so well as this book did. I found the book very useful.
Rating: 
Summary: it cover de ground mon, and a lot more too.
Review: Any book on multithreading this well written and illustrated and going from test-and-set to volatile- well mon, you gots to
understand what you getting- the very best. Mucho kudos to the
writers and their collaborators- power players if there ever were power players. I give it a ten.
Rating: 
Summary: Disorganized Mess
Review: I purchased this book hoping to develop a deeper understanding of multi-threading, the proverbial under-the-hood down and roll-your-sleeves-up nitty gritty. Frankly this book left me quite disappointed. It's poorly organized and poorly editted. While I am sure it has some valuable content, the low readability level and very poor organization (it really gives the impression that it was sort of patched together) prevented me from ever getting into it. In my humble opinion, the book "Taming Java Threads" by Allen Holub is a fare better choice if you want to master Java threads.
Rating:
Summary: Disorganized Mess
Review: I purchased this book hoping to develop a deeper understanding of multi-threading, the proverbial under-the-hood down and roll-your-sleeves-up nitty gritty. Frankly this book left me quite disappointed. It's poorly organized and poorly editted. While I am sure it has some valuable content, the low readability level and very poor organization (it really gives the impression that it was sort of patched together) prevented me from ever getting into it. In my humble opinion, the book "Taming Java Threads" by Allen Holub is a fare better choice if you want to master Java threads.
Rating: 
Summary: Fantasic book of threading, and somewhere in it is Java...
Review: If you want a book on Java threading, just to get you by, little cut and paste code and if you read it you might learn something by osmosis, this aint the book for you. If you want to know all about threading, where it came from (including history anecdotes), what it is, where it's going, all the methods and techniques to managing it all, and from complete knowledge you derive very complete skills in programming... This is the book. Loses a couple of stars as it takes a way of reading it and full of totally useless diagrams, they mean well though. It is well written enough that the explanations will give you what you need to know, and worse comes to worse you can walk through the code. Sometimes annoying that Java is most often the last consideration, but as I said, you'll come out knowing everything going on around your code. Because it goes into low level OS threads, you'll come out with understanding as to how different platforms handle the JVM threads so you know wich platform will best run your multithreading program. Lost stars because up until it all started fitting together, it annoyed the s**t out of me that Java wasn't the prime force in this book, and had to wade through C and Windows stuff.
Rating:
Summary: Fantasic book of threading, and somewhere in it is Java...
Review: If you want a book on Java threading, just to get you by, little cut and paste code and if you read it you might learn something by osmosis, this aint the book for you. If you want to know all about threading, where it came from (including history anecdotes), what it is, where it's going, all the methods and techniques to managing it all, and from complete knowledge you derive very complete skills in programming... This is the book. Loses a couple of stars as it takes a way of reading it and full of totally useless diagrams, they mean well though. It is well written enough that the explanations will give you what you need to know, and worse comes to worse you can walk through the code. Sometimes annoying that Java is most often the last consideration, but as I said, you'll come out knowing everything going on around your code. Because it goes into low level OS threads, you'll come out with understanding as to how different platforms handle the JVM threads so you know wich platform will best run your multithreading program. Lost stars because up until it all started fitting together, it annoyed the s**t out of me that Java wasn't the prime force in this book, and had to wade through C and Windows stuff.
Rating:
Summary: Poor writing
Review: Prentice Hall's other books (Core Java, Just Java, etc.) were so good that I didn't bother to carefully look at Multithreaded Programming with Java Technology before buying it. I wish I had looked closer! This book is poorly written, poorly edited, poorly organized, and is only partially about Java threads. It appears to be a port from the authors' previous book on pthreads, and takes up too much space covering details of the underlying hardware without adequately covering Java itself. Many of the examples show C code, and their coverage of Java almost seems like an afterthought. If you're interested in Java threading and are in the market for a good book, I suggest that you keep looking. For an example of the poor style of writing, look at chapter 4's section on The Runnable Interface.
Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Book!!
Review: Reader's opinions are very important to me, after all I didn't write this just to see my name in print. I wrote it because there were no books I found adaquate (that and to become rich, famous, and have beautiful women kiss the ground I walk on). The one thing which is very true is that this is NOT a book about Java, it's a book about multithreading. I feel it is important for programmers to understand how Java is implemented on lower level libraries and how those run on the actual hardware, and how that hardware works. Not everybody wants to know all of this. (They *should*, but alas! not everyone takes my excellent advice.) Of course, by trying to cover so much in so little space (I worked very hard to keep it short), I've bitten off an awfully large chunk to swallow. And seeing as you the reader has to do the swallowing... You gotta make up your own mind. Some people do not like humor and computer science in their programming texts. Others love it. The one clearly wonderful thing about this book is that I got to spend time working with some of the finest computer scientists in the world (Guy Steele, Doug Lea, Tim Lindholm, Dave Butenhof, etc.). I also got to influence the Java 2 spec and Sun's implementation. (Am I bragging here? Oh well.) The reviews are pretty fair and reflect precisely that problematic issue of depth, Do you want to just write some Java code, or do you want to understand it too? [Except for that last review. This is not good writing?! Poppycock! This is beautiful, elevated prose! This is sophisticated, humorous, precise, concise, incisive explaination, elaboration, clairfication! Profusely illustrated and painstakingly drawn! The Philistine.] Thus, IMHO, This is one fine piece of computer science literature, destined to become a classic! -Bil
Rating:
Summary: Author's Thoughts
Review: Reader's opinions are very important to me, after all I didn't write this just to see my name in print. I wrote it because there were no books I found adaquate (that and to become rich, famous, and have beautiful women kiss the ground I walk on). The one thing which is very true is that this is NOT a book about Java, it's a book about multithreading. I feel it is important for programmers to understand how Java is implemented on lower level libraries and how those run on the actual hardware, and how that hardware works. Not everybody wants to know all of this. (They *should*, but alas! not everyone takes my excellent advice.) Of course, by trying to cover so much in so little space (I worked very hard to keep it short), I've bitten off an awfully large chunk to swallow. And seeing as you the reader has to do the swallowing... You gotta make up your own mind. Some people do not like humor and computer science in their programming texts. Others love it. The one clearly wonderful thing about this book is that I got to spend time working with some of the finest computer scientists in the world (Guy Steele, Doug Lea, Tim Lindholm, Dave Butenhof, etc.). I also got to influence the Java 2 spec and Sun's implementation. (Am I bragging here? Oh well.) The reviews are pretty fair and reflect precisely that problematic issue of depth, Do you want to just write some Java code, or do you want to understand it too? [Except for that last review. This is not good writing?! Poppycock! This is beautiful, elevated prose! This is sophisticated, humorous, precise, concise, incisive explaination, elaboration, clairfication! Profusely illustrated and painstakingly drawn! The Philistine.] Thus, IMHO, This is one fine piece of computer science literature, destined to become a classic! -Bil
Rating: 
Summary: Little to do with Java besides the title
Review: That this book was a member of the Sun Java series was the primary reason make me take a look at this book. I have been highly disappointed. This body of work for this book is primarly a rushed port of the authors other title - named, funnily enough Multithreaded Programming with PThreads. The Java topics seem to be bolted on as an after-thought - and makes the book read and present very badly. For example a good amount of examples are presented in C not Java, demonstrating POSIX threading! The author is also in the bad habit of presenting material out-of-order, so that the reader has to wait sometimes 50 pages for clarification. This does not breed suspense, merely frustation at the disorder. The low-level OS technical coverage is quite adequate - with a good explanation of LWP and POSIX threading (if only this is what I bought the book for!). The author is clearly a C type who has come to Java and tries to basically recreate the semantics of C POSIX threading in Java... while at the same time constantly drifting back to a topic that he is clearly more comfortable with - PThreads. This is hardly an embracing approach for a book with the word Java in the title - an obvious cash-in on the behalf of the publisher, Prentice Hall. Do not buy this book.
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