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| Java Concurrency in Practice | 
 enlarge | Authors: Brian Goetz, Tim Peierls, Joshua Bloch, Joseph Bowbeer, David Holmes, Doug Lea
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Category: Book
List Price: $54.99
Buy New: $28.96
You Save: $26.03 (47%)
New (37) Used (10) from $28.96
Avg. Customer Rating:  50 reviews
Sales Rank: 1965
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 0321349601
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.133
EAN: 9780321349606
ASIN: 0321349601
Publication Date: May 19, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 45 more reviews...
The definitive book on concurrency in Java May 29, 2006
58 out of 61 found this review helpful
Concurrency, in the form of threads, has been present in the Java language from its beginning, and this book is all about concurrency in the current and future versions of Java with an emphasis on writing practical code. This book does for concurrent programming in Java what Geary's series of books did for graphical Java - it moves concurrent Java programming out of the realm of applets containing bouncing balls and into that of providing real solutions for professional programmers.
This book is not meant to be an introduction to concurrency in Java. Its intention is to offer practical design rules to assist developers in the difficult process of creating safe, fast, and high-performance concurrent classes. While many of the general concepts in this book are applicable to versions of Java prior to Java 1.5, most of the code examples and all the statements about the Java Memory Model assume Java 1.5 or later. By "later" I mean that some of the code examples use library features added in the not-yet released Java 1.6. After the introduction, which consists of Chapter 1, the book is divided into four parts:
Part one, "Fundamentals", (Chapters 2-5) are about the basic concepts of concurrency, thread safety, and composing thread-safe classes from those concurrent building blocks provided by the Java language. Chapter 2, "Thread Safety", and 3, "Sharing Objects", include nearly all of the rules on avoiding concurrency hazards, constructing thread-safe classes, and verifying thread safety. Thus, these chapters emphasize theory and have less code than other chapters in the book. Chapter 4 , "Composing Objects", covers techniques for composing large thread-safe classes from smaller thread-safe classes. Chapter 5, "Building Blocks", covers thread-safe collections and synchronizers, which are the the concurrent building blocks provided by Java. To conclude the section, the authors work through the steps of building an efficient, scalable result cache that could be used in a web server. A summary of the most important rules presented in Part one occur at the end of the section.
Part two, "Structuring Concurrent Applications", describes how proper use of threading improves the throughput and responsiveness of concurrent applications. The topics covered in this section include identifying tasks that can be run in parallel and programming them as such, proper termination of tasks, using thread pools for greater efficiency in multi-threaded systems, and finally improving the responsiveness of single-threaded systems, GUI's being the most prominent example.
Part 3, "Liveness, Performance, and Testing" is concerned with ensuring that concurrent programs actually do what is expected of them and do so with acceptable performance. The authors describe how to avoid situations where a thread waits forever, also known as a "liveness failure". Also included in this section is an excellent explanation of the use of the "ThreadLocal" class and how it makes it much easier to manage the process of associating a thread with its per-thread data.
Part 4, "Advanced Topics", covers issues that will probably be interesting only to experienced developers. These topics include explicit locks, atomic variables, nonblocking algorithms, and developing custom synchronizers. Any of these techniques, explicit locks in particular, can cause chaos when done incorrectly. This book shows how to use these techniques safely and with confidence.
One of the things that makes this book so good are the many code examples. There are only snippets of entire programs included in the book itself in order to highlight the portions relevant to the concurrency issue being discussed. The code examples are either good examples, questionable examples, or bad code examples and are decorated with "Smiley Faces" that are either happy, concerned, or unhappy depending on the quality of the code. The full versions of the code examples, as well as supplementary examples and errata, are supposed to be available from the book's website. However, at the time I am writing this, they are not yet available.
Overall, I would say that this is the most complete and accessible resource on concurrency in Java I have seen in print. I highly recommend it.
Excellent coverage of Java multi-threading June 2, 2006
24 out of 27 found this review helpful
The book is by far the best one on Java concurrency. There is really nothing out there that has such comprehensive coverage of this topic. Doug Lee's book is a bit theoretical and somewhat dry, but would be a nice complement to this book if you want to think some more about concurrency. This book has a very strong practical vector. Coverage of Java 5 concurrency features is very thorough. The book is extremely well-written, relatively easy to read.
The book stands on par with such established Java book jems as Josh Bloch's "Effective Java", Eckel's "Thinking in Java" and Rod Johnson's J2EE books.
All in all, this is a definite must have for any Java specialist.
Clear approach to a complex topic April 10, 2006
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
We've been reading a pre-release version of this book as part of a local study group and I'm very impressed with the treatment.
Concurrency is perhaps one of the hardest issues to understand well and it's equally difficult to explain all of the issues, but Goetz et. al. do a very nice job of explaining clearly the different ways a multi-threaded process can fail and then providing concrete design philosophies that will help address those problems.
In my experience, concurrency books often fall between providing too little detail ("just add synchronized to everything and all should be well") to providing too much ("details of how the Java Memory Model actually behaves on a multi-processor machine"). Java Concurrency in Practice seems to find a nice balance, e.g. thoroughly explaining why you need to worry about how values are "published" between threads but without swamping you with so much information about the details of how this is done by the VM that you're left gasping for air.
For me, this is a focus on the practical aspects of building multi-threaded applications in real world situations. In such cases, you need to fully understand the potential pitfalls and then you want to have a list of specific design methodologies which help avoid those failings. Java Concurrency in Practice does a nice job of providing both.
The best book on Java in a long time April 18, 2006
12 out of 15 found this review helpful
Brian has a winner here. I was fortunate to obtain a preview copy from Brian Goetz and have devoured the book. This is the first book that I know of since Doug Lea's Concurrent Programming in Java, that addresses Java threading and concurrency with such vigor.
Each section has a solid example that will also stand up in the real world.
The book was put together very carefully, with great attention to detail, as is essential for a book about concurrency.
One of the best parts of the book was Brian leading me on all the time. He would show me a piece of code as a solution to a problem, and I would think of ways that it could cause problems. He then addressed those problems on his next page, but caused other problems. This carried on until the final solution, which was always elegant beyond anything I have written :-)
A solid 5 star rating for this book!
Definitely a good meaty book for Java Specialists.
At last! A readable, expert book on Java concurrency August 7, 2006
12 out of 12 found this review 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.
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