Java Concurrency in Practice

For any programmer writing or using multi-threaded code this book is a godsend. The writing is clear and accessible, the examples are relevant to day to day development and the coverage is bang up to date. Likely to join Effective Java: A Programming Language Guide (Java Series) as essential reading for Java developers.

great introduction to Java's concurrency API (3/3 people found this helpful)

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.

At last! A readable expert book on Java concurrency (43/43 people found this helpful)

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.

Brian Goetz, Tim Peierls, Joshua Bloch, Joseph Bowbeer, David Holmes, Doug Lea

Reader Reviews:

Comprehensive, Up to Date and Accessible (0/0 people found this helpful)

great introduction to Java's concurrency API (3/3 people found this helpful)

At last! A readable expert book on Java concurrency (43/43 people found this helpful)

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