Multithreaded Programming with Windows NT

Rating:
Summary: Great book for both beginners and software professionals
Review: I found this book to be the best primer for someone who has not done any multithreaded programming. The examples are concise and straight to the point. I read this book in two days . This book was very similar to an Operating Systems course that I had taken where I learned about concurrent programming; e.g., the "Reader-writers" and the "Dinning Philosphers" problems, deadlocks/starvation, race conditions, and how to synchronize events, etc.. In a world where getting information/samples to show "how to" do multithreaded programming, this book will give you a starting point to build on. "Highly recommended".

Rating:
Summary: You can hit the ground with your feet running...
Review: I found this book to be the best primer for someone who has not done any multithreaded programming. The examples are concise and straight to the point. I read this book in two days . This book was very similar to an Operating Systems course that I had taken where I learned about concurrent programming; e.g., the "Reader-writers" and the "Dinning Philosphers" problems, deadlocks/starvation, race conditions, and how to synchronize events, etc.. In a world where getting information/samples to show "how to" do multithreaded programming, this book will give you a starting point to build on. "Highly recommended".

Rating:
Summary: Fundamentally Flawed Examples
Review: This book offers good solutions, overall. But it's advice is ocasionally flawed fatally. Within the first couple chapters, for example, the authors write all of their examples to call TerminateThread(), which is a fatal and unforgivable mistake that results in nothing more than unstability. Worse, throught the book, they code threads that use the C runtime libraries but start the threads with the CreateThread() API--that causes the runtime libraries to not correctly initialize or shutdown in all cases, and that results in memory leaks and unstability. While the authors clearly treat deadlocks and thread programming models, their implementations are still mortally flawed. A score of 10 for great abstract descriptions plus a score of 1 for terribly poor implementations and samples results in a score of five.

Rating:
Summary: Great book for both beginners and software professionals
Review: This book took me from knowing nothing about thread programming to writing professional mulithreaded programs very quickly. If you are tasked to write multithreaded programs under Windows NT (like I was) this book will give you a flying start.