Java Concurrency in Practice: Amazon.co.uk: Brian Goetz, Tim Peierls, Joshua Bloch, Joseph Bowbeer, David Holmes, Doug Lea: Books

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"I was fortunate indeed to have worked with a fantastic team on the design and implementation of the concurrency features added to the Java platform in Java 5.0 and Java 6. Now this same team provides the best explanation yet of these new features, and of concurrency in general. Concurrency is no longer a subject for advanced users only. Every Java developer should read this book."
--Martin Buchholz
JDK Concurrency Czar, Sun Microsystems

"For the past 30 years, computer performance has been driven by Moore's Law; from now on, it will be driven by Amdahl's Law. Writing code that effectively exploits multiple processors can be very challenging. Java Concurrency in Practice provides you with the concepts and techniques needed to write safe and scalable Java programs for today's--and tomorrow's--systems."
--Doron Rajwan
Research Scientist, Intel Corp

"This is the book you need if you're writing--or designing, or debugging, or maintaining, or contemplating--multithreaded Java programs. If you've ever had to synchronize a method and you weren't sure why, you owe it to yourself and your users to read this book, cover to cover."
--Ted Neward
Author of Effective Enterprise Java

"Brian addresses the fundamental issues and complexities of concurrency with uncommon clarity. This book is a must-read for anyone who uses threads and cares about performance."
--Kirk Pepperdine
CTO, JavaPerformanceTuning.com

"This book covers a very deep and subtle topic in a very clear and concise way, making it the perfect Java Concurrency reference manual. Each page is filled with the problems (and solutions!) that programmers struggle with every day. Effectively exploiting concurrency is becoming more and more important now that Moore's Law is delivering more cores but not faster cores, and this book will show you how to do it."
--Dr. Cliff Click
Senior Software Engineer, Azul Systems

"I have a strong interest in concurrency, and have probably written more thread deadlocks and made more synchronization mistakes than most programmers. Brian's book is the most readable on the topic of threading and concurrency in Java, and deals with this difficult subject with a wonderful hands-on approach. This is a book I am recommending to all my readers of The Java Specialists' Newsletter, because it is interesting, useful, and relevant to the problems facing Java developers today."
--Dr. Heinz Kabutz
The Java Specialists' Newsletter

"I've focused a career on simplifying simple problems, but this book ambitiously and effectively works to simplify a complex but critical subject: concurrency. Java Concurrency in Practice is revolutionary in its approach, smooth and easy in style, and timely in its delivery--it's destined to be a very important book."
--Bruce Tate
Author of Beyond Java

"Java Concurrency in Practice is an invaluable compilation of threading know-how for Java developers. I found reading this book intellectually exciting, in part because it is an excellent introduction to Java's concurrency API, but mostly because it captures in a thorough and accessible way expert knowledge on threading not easily found elsewhere."
--Bill Venners
Author of Inside the Java Virtual Machine

Threads are a fundamental part of the Java platform. As multicore processors become the norm, using concurrency effectively becomes essential for building high-performance applications. Java SE 5 and 6 are a huge step forward for the development of concurrent applications, with improvements to the Java Virtual Machine to support high-performance, highly scalable concurrent classes and a rich set of new concurrency building blocks. In Java Concurrency in Practice, the creators of these new facilities explain not only how they work and how to use them, but also the motivation and design patterns behind them.

However, developing, testing, and debugging multithreaded programs can still be very difficult; it is all too easy to create concurrent programs that appear to work, but fail when it matters most: in production, under heavy load. Java Concurrency in Practice arms readers with both the theoretical underpinnings and concrete techniques for building reliable, scalable, maintainable concurrent applications. Rather than simply offering an inventory of concurrency APIs and mechanisms, it provides design rules, patterns, and mental models that make it easier to build concurrent programs that are both correct and performant.

This book covers:

Basic concepts of concurrency and thread safety
Techniques for building and composing thread-safe classes
Using the concurrency building blocks in java.util.concurrent
Performance optimization dos and don'ts
Testing concurrent programs
Advanced topics such as atomic variables, nonblocking algorithms, and the Java Memory Model

From the Back Cover

This book covers:

Basic concepts of concurrency and thread safety
Techniques for building and composing thread-safe classes
Using the concurrency building blocks in java.util.concurrent
Performance optimization dos and don'ts
Testing concurrent programs
Advanced topics such as atomic variables, nonblocking algorithms, and the Java Memory Model

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56 of 56 people found the following review helpful

At last! A readable expert book on Java concurrency 7 Aug 2006

By Thing with a hook

Format:Paperback

Concurrency is hard and boring. Unfortunately, my favoured technique of ignoring it and hoping it will go away doesn't look like it's going to bear fruit. Fortunately, Java 5.0 introduced a new bunch of concurrency utilities, that work at a higher level of abstraction than marking blocks as synchronized and fields as volatile. Unfortunately, there haven't been that many books on the subject - even the good Java 5.0 books (e.g. Head First Java or Agile Java) make little mention of them - Thinking in Java being an honourable exception. Fortunately, JCIP is here, and it is authoritative stuff. And it's (mostly) very easy to understand. Plus, at 350 pages, it's not an enormous chore to slog through. It even covers changes to the upcoming Java 6.

Before tackling this book, you should have at least some idea of pre-Java 5.0 concurrency. You don't need to be a threading master, though, as the first part of the book covers basics like deadlock, atomicity and liveness. This was my favourite part of the book, as it comes with lots of small code snippets, both right and (horribly) wrong, and pithy design guidelines. It's rather like Effective Java in that respect - although the material on threading was probably the weakest part of that book, so this is a definite improvement.

The second part deals with thread pools, cancellation strategies, and GUIs. This is also excellent. Part three covers performance and testing. The last 75 pages are for advanced users and goes into a fair amount of low level detail (including a discussion of the Java Memory Model), which may be of interest to experts only.

I would be lying if I said that reading this book will demystify concurrency completely. Who wrote which bit of the book is unclear (although readers of Effective Java will probably spot parts of the text that seem rather Joshua Blochish), but while it's mostly very clear, some parts of the text are a little murkier than other. Perhaps this is to be expected given the subject matter. But for the most part it's surprisingly easy reading, and very practical to boot.

Let's face it, short of aliens landing and introducing a radically new way of computing, multicores are here for the medium term at least, so thread-dodging wimps such as myself will just have to get used to it. That being so, this book is going to be installed as one of the must-read books in the Java pantheon.

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

great introduction to Java's concurrency API 28 Jun 2007

By Lo in Londinium

If you are serious about java development you know you can't ignore threads.

Yet, so many skilled developers incredibly passionate about object orientation seem uneasy when confronted with threading-issues.

Is i++ an atomic operation ? Have you ever heard of CopyOnWriteArrayList ?

Do you know how to deal with InterruptedException ?

This is a very readable book which will make sure not only that your code will not deadlock but that you know why.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

Up to date blueprints for writing multi-threaded apps. 8 Mar 2009

By Mr. Jeremy Flowers

I would go so far as to say the authors have done a commendable job cracking a tough nut.

By reading the book you will be instilled with a set of blueprints that you can use to code multi-threaded apps and facilitate writing
threaded apps using the latest Java 5 and 6 classes.

Real life analogies were usually given to put problems into perspective at the outset of a new topic.

The book gave examples categorised into three groups. Good, bad and fragile stylised with a smiley, sad and indifferent faces.

For me seeing how not to code is equally valuable, lest you get caught with the same traps.

The book was broken down into four sections:
I Fundamentals
II Structuring Concurrent Applications
III Liveness, Perfomance & Testing
IV Advanced Topics

The book also has a good bibliography for further reading. I particularly found Hans Boehm's article excellent supplementary reading.

I particularly liked coverage of non-blocking synchronisation in chapter 15.

In contrast I found chapter 12 to be the most daunting to get to grips with (Testing Concurrent Apps). I found myself losing the thread in Listing 12-12! (Where a listing boils down to just a method! With undefined variable "barrier". barrier.await() is declared twice in succession! Huh? What's barrier?).
Thank heavens for section 12.4.2. / Findbugs.

jcip.net is the website where you can find the book source and errata.