Programming with POSIX(R) Threads (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series) | 
| Author: David R. Butenhof
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Category: Book
List Price: $54.99
Buy New: $35.73
You Save: $19.26 (35%)
New (21) Used (10) from $25.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 368523
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 0201633922
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.27
UPC: 785342633924
EAN: 9780201633924
Publication Date: May 26, 1997
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: New Publisher's Overstock! May have a small remainder mark.All orders shipped within 1 business day! Delivery confirmation emails including tracking numbers provided on all domestic orders.
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Product Description
Here is a programmer's guide to using and programming POSIX threads, commonly known as Pthreads. A "coder's book", this title tells how to use Pthreads in the real world, making efficient and portable applications. Pthreads are an important set of current tools programmers need to have in today's network-intensive climate.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 18 more reviews...
 Exceptional November 7, 2008
I have used pthreads pretty extensively. If there is any book close to being called bible,this is it. Go get it.
A 'need to have' for experts and non-expers January 7, 2008
I first read the book about 6 years ago (2003) when on my MSc studies. A friend lent me the book to read as a basic introduction for thread programming. At that time I was doing projects in Java only, but surprisingly it was so easy to understand Java thread model by reading the book with code samples in C.
Two years later, I stayed on PhD studies at the University. Once again I needed to do some parallel processing project. I ordered the book through my library. Once again it became handy. But it still wasn't on my bookshelf - I had to go to the library to have it.
This year I said to myself: 'No. If you needed this book so many time, you got to have it on your bookshelf'. So there you go - I bought it as a gift for myself for Christmas 2007.
The best book on the topic October 26, 2007
In my opinion, this book is better than Pthreads Programming: A POSIX Standard for Better Multiprocessing (O'Reilly Nutshell) because it goes way beyond just presenting the pthreads API. One critic I had on all the other multithreading books that I have read is that they are not covering issues with multithread programs on a SMP system. This book is actually discussing some of these issues on several pages! Beside this quality, it also covers high-level design patterns on how you can use threads such as pipelines, work crew and client/server. There is also a chapter showing how to program with thread cancellation and a section explaining how to create new synchronization objects from the primitives. This brings me to the only problem that I can think of this book: its age. It is not totally up to date. Learning how you can build new synchronization objects by itself is a very interesting exercise but the problem is that the new synchronization objects built are the barrier and the read/write lock which have been added to the pthreads API since the book publication. Also, except for a small section describing the futur of pthreads, the newest additions to the pthread API are not described.
Excellent book with practical advice for software developers July 27, 2007
I've been using this book as a reference for Pthread programming for the past 2 years. The thing that strikes me most about this book is that it *always* has the answers to my questions, and those answers are always easy to find.
A couple of examples. I was thinking to myself "Wow, if the thread was to be cancelled while these set of operations were executing, things would be very broken. How do I make sure these operations get executed in full?"
So, I went to the index and looked up 'Cancellation', under which there was 'deferred', which pointed me to pages 147-150. Right on the top of page 147 it says "A thread can disable cancellation around sections of code that need to complete without interruption, by calling pthread_setcancelstate." It then goes on to give examples. I thought to myself "That was easy!"
Another example, I wanted to know how to protect a local static variable from multiple simultaneous initialization. I looked up 'Initialization' in the index, which pointed me to pages 131-134. Sure enough, on page 132 it says "If more than one thread executes the initialization sequence concurrently, two threads may both find 'initializer' to be 0, and both perform the initialization, which, presumably, should have performed only once. The state of initialization is a shared invariant that must be protected by a mutex. You can code your own one-time initialization using a boolean variable and a statically initialized mutex. In many cases this will be more convenient than pthread_once, and it will always be more efficient."
Wow, another clearly explained answer to my question. I could give another example regarding how to properly use condition variables and avoid subtle race conditions, but suffice it to say the answer was easily located and clearly explained. If only more books were this accessible!
Is this book suitable for an expert Pthreads programmer? I don't know; I'm not that person. What I do know is that I have to write Pthreads code that is correct and reliable, and this book gives me the advice I need to make that happen.
Mr. Butenhof, could you please write more books on POSIX programming?
 Okayish June 30, 2007
Pros:
- Understandable language
Cons:
- Need better explanations though.
Overall, okay for the price, if you arent looking for too much.
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