Multithreaded Programming With PThreads

Rating:
Summary: User of Sun Equipment, writer of parallel software.
Review: As technical books go, this is the second worst book I've ever personally bought - and I have five book cases full of books (mostly technical ones).

The book covers far too much material, in far too small a depth, to be of any use to anyone. Since it's published by Sun Microsystems, whose main operating system is Solaris, I thought there might be a decent coverage of threads on Solaris, with less devoted to NT, Dec and whoever elses. But no, there is as much coverage on Solaris threads, as there is on any other. You could say it's a balanced coverage, but at such a depth to be useless to anyone really. If you need to know about threads on Windows, find a specific book. If you need to know about pthreads, find a better book on pthreads.

Just avoid this book. However Sun Microsystems, a respected producer of hardware and some excellent technical books, published such rubbish I don't know.

Do youself a favor, take a look at 'Multithreaded, Parallel and Distributed Programming' by Gregory R. Andrews. That is a good book on parallel programming, with an indepth discussion about algorithms, and code to implement them in threads, openMP and MPI. It's coverage of algorithms, barriers, locks etc is excellent.

Rating:
Summary: Simply useless
Review: If you have no clue what a pthread function name is, or what this crazy multithreading idea is all about, then maybe this book will help you some...but I have my doubts. Otherwise, this serves as both a poor reference, a poor primer guide, a poor advanced guide, and poor toilet paper. I've never seen a book manage to miss as a reference, miss as a primer, and miss as an advanced guide. There are easily better books and online resources available, as it's hard to be much worse than this.

This book is akin to learning French by teaching some basic grammar, some advanced grammar, and then shouting: "Je ne sais pas!" "Je voudrais un peu cherise!" without telling you what these mean...and leaving you clueless as to how to find out about them.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful!
Review: The authors of this book, in addition to their knowledge of threads, also know how to teach. The only shortcoming I could point out is that certain topics are treated shallowly, while less important topics are explained with too much detail.

What's really interesting about the book is the authors' ``don't do that'' style. Another reviewer found this style to be bad. I found it highly helpful. Instead of presenting a single solution for a problem (``The One and Only True Solution''), and leaving the reader wondering about alternative solutions, they go on to explain what's wrong with these other solutions. People learn by making mistakes, and the authors point out lots of mistakes that can be avoided. This is an invaluable feature, not a bug.

Rating:
Summary: Simply useless
Review: This Book covers too many topics unnecessarily, so when you really want to go a little deep into a specific field and make yourself clear, that will be not possible.
This book is not really suitable for real multi-threaded programmer.
New multi-threaded leaners maybe will found it useful for basic concepts.

Rating:
Summary: Where is the source-code for download?
Review: This book didn't supply source code for download neither attach CD-ROM. How can I verify whether it's true?