Concurrent Programming: Principles and Practice

Rating:
Summary: It's a bit heavy stuff but well organized text book
Review: It is a good book for anyone who wants to lecture in concurrent programming.This book will also help anyone explain the confusion among concurrent, parallel and distributed programs which have been around for the last three decades. The author touches the same three underlying concepts : processes, communication and synchronization. The ten chapters of the book is organized into four parts : basic concepts, shared variables, message passing and pratice. The first part, basic concepts, provides a formal presentation to introduce an assertional proof techniques for sequential and concurrent programming. The second and third parts, shared variables and message passing, elaborates the two major categories of synchronization technique in concurrent programming. Systematic method to solve synchronization problems are described throughout the chapters in two. In the last part, practice, the author provides an overview of five concurrent languanges : Turing Plus, Occam, Ada, SR and Linda. Comparison and performance experiments of all languanges are also provided in the last chapter. The book also includes some classic concurrent programming problems such as critical sections, producers and consumers, readers and writers, the dining philosophers and resource allocation. The 'Historical Notes and References' provided at the end of every chapter is a plus in which it provides citations to relevant literature and more insights to the related subject.