Recommended Multithreading Book

Question

I want to read a good book about multithreading and parallelism. I have a primarily .NET background but I think I would prefer a book focused on first principles and working into general patterns and algorithms and being overall less technology specific.

Obviously a discussion of the kind of low-level system architecture issues that the C# "volatile" keyword attempts to address (for example) would be important, just without being tied directly to a particular language.

Is there a particular book in this field that stands out among the others?

Thanks,

Answer 1

Joe Duffy has a book coming out soon: Concurrent Programming on Windows

Obviously that's somewhat technology specific, but it goes into a lot of low-level detail and also addresses the principles involved. It's platform-specific but not really language-specific. It's also by someone who I trust enormously when it comes to concurrency.

Answer 2

I recommend Principles of Concurrent and Distributed Programming by M. Ben-Ari, or his first about Concurrent Programming

Answer 3

Joe Albahari's free ebook Threading in C# is excellent.

Answer 4

I haven't read it yet, but The Art of Multiprocessor Programming by Herlihy and Shavit has been getting good reviews.

Answer 5

Jeffrey Richter's CLR via C# has a couple of great chapters on asynchronous programming in CLR.

Answer 6

The best resource for learning how to use multi-threading in an OO language that I've ever used is:

Lea, Douglas - Concurrent Programming in Java(TM): Design Principles and Patterns (3rd Edition)

If you want to understand low-level hardware/software details and how Java/.NET multi-threading constructs are implemented then the following is a great start:

Butenhof, David R. - Programming with POSIX(R) Threads (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)

To understand how to apply concepts from the pthreads book to a Windows environment then the following is essential:

Hart, Johnson M. - Windows System Programming (3rd Edition)

Answer 7

I am aiming for C++ Concurrency in Action to be that book, at least if you're programming in C++. Though all the examples are C++-specific, lots of the principles are not. See, for example, the excerpt recently published on CodeGuru about deadlock.