| Providing an overview of the Solaris and POSIX multithreading architectures, this book explains threads at a level that is completely accessible to programmers and system architects with no previous knowledge of threads. Covers the business and technical benefits of threaded programs, along with discussions of third party software that is threaded, pointing out the benefits. For programmers, system architects, and technical programmer managers.
This book aims to give the programmer or technical manager a solid, basic understanding of threads—what they are, how they work, why they are useful, and some of the programming issues surrounding their use. As an introductory text, it does not attempt a deep, detailed analysis. (At present, there are no deep, detailed analyses!) After reading this book the reader should have a solid understanding of the fundamentals, be able to write credible, modestly complex, threaded programs and have the understanding necessary to analyze their own programs and determine the viability of threading them.
This book is written with the experienced C/UNIX programmer in mind. A non-UNIX programmer will find a few of the details unfamiliar, but the concepts clear. A non-C programmer will find the code fragments and API descriptions mildly challenging, though possible to decipher, while the concepts should be clear. A technically minded nonprogrammer should be able to follow most of the concepts and understand the value of threads. A nontechnical person will not get much from this book.
This book does not attempt to explain the usage of the Win32 or OS/2 APIs. It does contrast them to the POSIX API in order to give the POSIX programmer a feeling for what kind of porting issues might be involved when writing to more than one of these libraries. |
