Product Description

With this practical book, you will attain a solid understanding of threads and will discover how to put this powerful mode of programming to work in real-world applications.

The primary advantage of threaded programming is that it enables your applications to accomplish more than one task at the same time by using the number-crunching power of multiprocessor parallelism and by automatically exploiting I/O concurrency in your code, even on a single processor machine. The result: applications that are faster, more responsive to users, and often easier to maintain. Threaded programming is particularly well suited to network programming where it helps alleviate the bottleneck of slow network I/O.

This book offers an in-depth description of the IEEE operating system interface standard, POSIXAE (Portable Operating System Interface) threads, commonly called Pthreads. Written for experienced C programmers, but assuming no previous knowledge of threads, the book explains basic concepts such as asynchronous programming, the lifecycle of a thread, and synchronization. You then move to more advanced topics such as attributes objects, thread-specific data, and realtime scheduling. An entire chapter is devoted to "real code," with a look at barriers, read/write locks, the work queue manager, and how to utilize existing libraries. In addition, the book tackles one of the thorniest problems faced by thread programmers-debugging-with valuable suggestions on how to avoid code errors and performance problems from the outset.

Numerous annotated examples are used to illustrate real-world concepts. A Pthreads mini-reference and a look at future standardization are also included.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #282330 in Books
• Published on: 1997-08-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

From the Back Cover

With this practical book, you will attain a solid understanding of threads and will discover how to put this powerful mode of programming to work in real-world applications.

The primary advantage of threaded programming is that it enables your applications to accomplish more than one task at the same time by using the number-crunching power of multiprocessor parallelism and by automatically exploiting I/O concurrency in your code, even on a single processor machine. The result: applications that are faster, more responsive to users, and often easier to maintain. Threaded programming is particularly well suited to network programming where it helps alleviate the bottleneck of slow network I/O.

This book offers an in-depth description of the IEEE operating system interface standard, POSIXAE (Portable Operating System Interface) threads, commonly called Pthreads. Written for experienced C programmers, but assuming no previous knowledge of threads, the book explains basic concepts such as asynchronous programming, the lifecycle of a thread, and synchronization. You then move to more advanced topics such as attributes objects, thread-specific data, and realtime scheduling. An entire chapter is devoted to "real code," with a look at barriers, read/write locks, the work queue manager, and how to utilize existing libraries. In addition, the book tackles one of the thorniest problems faced by thread programmers-debugging-with valuable suggestions on how to avoid code errors and performance problems from the outset.

Numerous annotated examples are used to illustrate real-world concepts. A Pthreads mini-reference and a look at future standardization are also included.

About the Author

David R. Butenhof, a recognized Pthreads authority, was deeply involved in the creation of the IEEE POSIX standard as well as the X/Open threading extensions, which were fast-tracked into X/Open XSH5 (UNIX98). An engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation, he was the lead architect and developer of Digital's own threading architecture and designed and implemented much of the Pthreads interfaces on Digital UNIX 4.0.

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Customer Reviews

The only book you need on threads
If you are thinking of developing a multi-threaded application, and you have absolutely no idea what threads are, this is the book for you. Starting from very simple exapmles, this book takes you to real-time scheduling and extended synchronisation techniques (barriers etc.), copmlete with code and hints on how to debug multi-threaded apps. Buy it now...

Thorough, readable, excellent
This is one of the best computing books I have read. Very readable and covers everything from explaining threads to advanced thread programming. The examples are just right: small enough to read quickly, big enough to be useful. You only need one book on threads and this is it.

Truly excellent guide
If the author ever revises the book, it would be nice to see a chapter on migrating code from draft 4 (CMA) threads to pthreads. Other than that, this really is the definitive guide to the subject.