I am planning to attend a one week course on this subject. I am primarily involved in Java projects and have decent knowledge of C and C++ too. And, I am interested in learning more on concurrent programming and would like to get feedback on this course. Has someone read the book or found these concepts relevant in contemporary programming?
More information on the course: http://www.amazon.com/Art-Multiprocessor-Programming-Maurice-Herlihy/dp/0123705916/
The concepts are very relevant.
I seem to recall I had a very quick "flick" through this book at some point. It covers some quite interesting material. But a slight thing that concerned me as I recall is that it presents various algorithm implementations that rely on access to volatile arrays, and assuming that the individual elements have volatile access semantics when doing so. As far as I'm aware, the Java Memory Model doesn't offer this guarantee, so the implementations given may need some modification.
I would definitely, suggest you to go with this. But I would like to add another really important resource, specific to java - as you labeled the question 'java' - which is Java Concurrency in Practice.