With this practical book, you will attain a solid understanding of threads and will discover how to put this powerful mode of programming to work in real-world applications.
The primary advantage of threaded programming is that it enables your applications to accomplish more than one task at the same time by using the number-crunching power of multiprocessor parallelism and by automatically exploiting I/O concurrency in your code, even on a single processor machine. The result: applications that are faster, more responsive to users, and often easier to maintain. Threaded programming is particularly well suited to network programming where it helps alleviate the bottleneck of slow network I/O.
This book offers an in-depth description of the IEEE operating system interface standard, POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface) threads, commonly called Pthreads. Written for experienced C programmers, but assuming no previous knowledge of threads, the book explains basic concepts such as asynchronous programming, the lifecycle of a thread, and synchronization. You then move to more advanced topics such as attributes objects, thread-specific data, and realtime scheduling. An entire chapter is devoted to "real code," with a look at barriers, read/write locks, the work queue manager, and how to utilize existing libraries. In addition, the book tackles one of the thorniest problems faced by thread programmers-debugging-with valuable suggestions on how to avoid code errors and performance problems from the outset.
Numerous annotated examples are used to illustrate real-world concepts. A Pthreads mini-reference and a look at future standardization are also included.
Newsgroups
Newsgroups
comp.programming.threads
General, unmoderated discussion of anything related to threads. This group is frequented by a number of people highly knowledgeable about threads in general, and about various specific implementations of Pthreads. It's a nice, friendly place to ask about problems you're having, or things you would like to do. Please, don't ask about screensavers! And, if you want to ask about a problem, always remember to tell us what type of hardware and operating system you're using and include the version.
comp.unix.osf.osfl
The primary discussion group for the Digital UNIX operating system. There are, of course, historical reasons for the nonintuitive name. This is a reasonable place to ask questions about using threads on Digital UNIX. If the question (or problem) doesn't seem to be specific to Digital UNIX, comp.programming.threads may be more appropriate, because it presents your question to a larger audience of thread experts, and makes the answer available to a larger audience of thread users.
comp.unix.solaris
The primary discussion group for the Solaris operating system. This is a reasonable place to ask questions about using threads on Solaris. If the question (or problem) doesn't seem to be specific to Solaris, comp.programming.threads may
be more appropriate, because it presents your question to a larger audience of thread experts, and makes the answer available to a larger audience of thread users.
