Threads are essential to Java programming, but learning to use them effectively is a nontrivial task. This new edition of the classic Java Threads shows you how to take full advantage of Java's threading facilities and brings you up-to-date with the watershed changes in Java 2 Standard Edition version 5.0 (J2SE 5.0). It provides a thorough, step-by-step approach to threads programming.
When Sun Microsystems released the alpha version of Java© in the winter of 1995, developers all over the world took notice. There were many features of Java that attracted these developers, not the least of which were the set of buzzwords Sun used to promote the language. Java was, among other things, robust, safe, architecture-neutral, portable, object-oriented, simple, and multithreaded. For many developers, these last two buzzwords seemed contradictory: how could a language that is multithreaded be simple?
It turns out that Java's threading system is simple, at least relative to other threading systems. This simplicity makes Java's threading system easy to learn so that even developers who are unfamiliar with threads can pick up the basics of thread programming with relative ease.
In early versions of Java, this simplicity came with tradeoffs; some of the advanced features that are found in other threading systems were not available in Java. Java 2 Standard Edition Version 5.0 (J2SE 5.0) changes all of that; it provides a large number of new thread-related classes that make the task of writing multithreaded programs that much easier.
Still, programming with threads remains a complex task. This book shows you how to use the threading tools in Java to perform the basic tasks of threaded programming and how to extend them to perform more advanced tasks for more complex programs.
