concurrent

Digital Product Design: Concurrent Engineering / PLM Principles, and Some Tools for Quality Design for Manufacturing, Assembly & Disassembly, and a Desktop ... Use Case... (Video & 3D eBook Combo Pack
$199.99
This is a novel DVD duo package. In the first DVD, on video, Professor Ranky introduces the basic concepts of Concurrent Engineering, and illustrates several fundamental product / process design, design for quality, assembly /disassembly, and other design rules with simple and practical examples whilst disassembling a desktop telephone on screen. In particular, the rules and principles discussed with examples include: design for quality, maintenance, assembly, disassembly, eco-friendly design issues, cost, risk, the concept of designing components, modules, and systems that can be assembled, as well as disassembled, material selection issues, design for the environment, the principle of 'z' stacking for assembly / disassembly, modular design principles, some part handling, and feeding issues, automated assembly and disassembly challenges, and others. The second DVD in this duo pack is a comprehensive web browser readable, interactive multimedia 3D eBook. Equivalent to over 600 pages of text, with interactive images, 3D objects, video clips and several active spreadsheets to calculate with, covering in 19 shapters all important aspects of Concurrent Engineering and PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) in depth.

Concurrent Programming on Windows
$54.99
Simply put, Joe Duffy is a world-wide authority on this topic. I don't just say that based on working with him (his office was 5 offices down the hall from mine), but also based on the conversations I've seen him dominate with other visionaries inside of Microsoft. If you don't take my word for it, just look at how elegant the Parallel Extensions to the .NET framework are that Joe was the dev lead and architect on. If you want to see examples of how clearly he can put his thoughts to writing, just visit his blog (http://www.bluebytesoftware.com/). 5 stars are not enough for this seminal piece of work.

Principles of Concurrent and Distributed Programming (2nd Edition)
$134.00
i have been reading about concurrency and related issues for quite a while now. after reading a few favorable reviews about this book here and elsewhere, i decided to give it a shot. i have read about 50 pages; what i am going to say will not change as i read more (safety property, if you will).

the part where deadlock and starvation freedom is presented and the example algorithms used for clarification is very dubious and makes me doubt the rigor with which this book was written. granted, deadlock seems to enjoy several slightly different semantics. this should not, however, mean that anything resembling deadlock freedom can be classified under deadlock freedom as its definition. there is one algorithm which clearly is not deadlock-free (under no contention, a thread should be always allowed to enter its critical section) and yet is tagged deadlock-free: its progress depends on the other thread's progress where this other thread might be lost somewhere in its remainder code, showing no interest in the critical section.

now, this example is at the beginning of the book and is about a very simple concept. if the author gets this wrong, what does one think about the rest of the book? will the reader be always on the lookout for possible subtle mistakes? it is my understanding that a reader should be able to trust the writer of the text to fully enjoy the text. this lack of trust made me suspend reading the book. i am trying to get the fundamental notions right before i go any further in this book.

at the end, what does this mean? buy and read this book only if you already have some other reference books on concurrency and want to see yet another approach to a still highly unstable research topic.

The Art of Concurrency: A Thread Monkey's Guide to Writing Parallel Applications
$44.99
This book is kind of a dull read for (in my opinion) interesting material. The writing style is informal, but self-importantly so (lots of "I did this" and "I've said this before"). Even discounting that, the writer cannot make the subject very interesting. Partly because he eschews figures or flowcharts or itemized steps for walls of text, partly because the writing itself is disjointed and not very good. Remember, informal != good.

Plus, the code is sloppy. Almost everywhere a main routine has a loop pthread_create'ing new threads, "new" is used to allocate and free is used to deallocate a pointer. This is the most egregious one; one can take issue with a lot of others (for example, why is the code C++ if 99% of it is C? Why is the pointer allocated in the main thread but freed in the worker thread?).

The thing I liked about the book is that it covers a lot of relevant topics, including modern ones such as MapReduce. It should reward someone with the patience to overlook its flaws.